


The Castle Built on Sand

by notaninternetkiller



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Backstory, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Hate to Love, Slow Burn, TW: Illness, tw: child abuse, tw: death, tw: flogging
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-04-18 09:27:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 109,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4700870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notaninternetkiller/pseuds/notaninternetkiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What lead to the establishment of an alliance between ones Charles Vane and Eleanor Guthrie and the bloody dissolution of that alliance. How the clash between two people plunged the ports of Nassau into war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue / 1689 / Of Fire and Fury

_And so it is, with that chilly air of death coming upon me, that I have finally taken it upon myself to share this story while it is still in my power to do so. My time grows short, as does the time of those of my generation who took for granted those tales shared to us by our fathers, and their fathers before them. Younger men have come along now, boys with wild fantasies of a life unhindered by rules or restrictions, visions of grand sea adventures and chivalrous sea captains, of great caves of gold and treasures unspoken. These men and their wild imaginations have so saturated the minds of the public so that the much darker truth of those most wretched of men, those who once went by the name of boucanier, is now at risk of being forgotten altogether, overshadowed by fairytales and bedtime stories._  
  
_Here I have carefully and to the best of my abilities collected all that was told to me by my forefathers in my youth, or, where I found my information lacking, of records that were made available to me. These are the collected accounts of that one who was given the name of Charles Vane, for the name to which he was born or the name given to him by his progenitors at birth is as much a mystery to me now as it was to those people who first wrote of this elusive creature over two centuries ago. In any case it is irrelevant, for the stories all people have come to know dares not even bestow upon this figure a Christian name, lest one be tempted to look upon him as a human creature, and be made to ask how it is that a mortal man could be driven to such lengths of unholy brutality. Rather, to the world and to the sea he is known by the title which he came to earn, that of Captain Vane. I shall entreaties to write this without malice nor judgement, and leave it to you, kind reader, to draw your own conclusions upon this most mysterious of creatures._  
  
_Written in the year of our grace,_  
_1889._

 

Prologue I:IV  
Fire and Fury  
_1689_

 

His age or even the year of his birth he knew not. His first memories were of running from a great wall of fire, of the screams behind him of those who could not do thus. His first thoughts were of a voice inside his head telling him not to stop, telling him not to look back, for to look back was surely to die in that inferno. Who he had been before then, to whom he owed his name and existence, he could no longer remember. To him, it were as though his life had been born of that great fire itself. Exhaustion must have gotten the better of him, for, after long periods of nothing but fire and mud and snow, his memories draw to a close.

 

There came along a good Samaritan, of that most rare breed of personage who would take it upon themselves to help a homeless child with no expectation of reward or recompense. It was they who deposited the young and unconscious orphan upon the doorstep of a workhouse, and in thus doing put into effect a series of most calamitous events. Events that would lead to the rise of the most notorious and feared villain of the western seas.

 

           The child was taken in, and presently that most important question was asked, and that most important issue was raised pertaining to the boy's Christian soul. If the child had already been christened, what harm could there be in baptising it again, just in case? The workhouse quickly made preparations for the child to be baptised, lest it die through the night. For if the child should die, and this was very much looking to be the case, it would be plunged into that level of purgatory so set aside for those pagans too young yet to have known any sins beyond the one which brought about their conception. And so it was that the child was baptised Charles, if for no other reason than the parish priest had been a veteran of the Civil wars and of that most fanatical devotion to the Royal cause. He was also, it should be noted, a drunkard, and may have been convinced this child was the actual heir to the throne, as he had suspected the previous five children he’d baptized just that very day.

 

And so it was that Charles, who had no one to give him a last name, was placed into the workhouse alongside some fifteen or twenty other offenders against the poor laws. Here, it was believed, the children lead a life of perpetual bliss, never knowing what it is to have people who constantly ask about petty things like their welfare, never knowing the ties of bondage that trap one to a family. The mistress of the workhouse was given a stipend from the parish, from where she drew her own compensation for the great burden that was placed upon her for having to live a life surrounded by such selfish and demanding little demons who hounded her day and night with such demands as ‘food,’ or ‘clothes.’ She was of the mind to ask for a higher stipend to allow for all the liquor she was forced to keep in stock for those particularly trying days when one of the children fell ill or fell somewhere or fell into something and then felt themselves quite entitled to her attention.

 

And then one day it happened that a man came to the workhouse. His powdered wig and crimson clothes were foreign enough to startle the children into silence. The man who smelled of fine perfume hid his clean face behind an embroidered handkerchief, wrinkling his nose and breathing through his mouth. It were as though he tried to protect himself from the mere stench of poverty lest it contaminate him too.

 

This creature met no one’s eyes, and when he stared at the boy it was as though he were looking right through him. It was upon that very day that he was given the last name of Vane, for the boy that came before him had been so named Underhill, and the boy who came after him given the name of Wagget. And so named the boys found themselves on a list, and from that list their value noted. A price was calculated thus, a shilling for the ones named Alfred, Hollman and Platt, for their large stature and sturdy build. Six pence, in turn, for the ones Harlowe, Rook and Parker, for though they were not as big, they were strong and clever and agile and could prove to be of some use in trades that called for quick thinking and quicker running. And finally for the ones named Epplett and Vane, a price of three pence was so determined, as recompense for clearing the boys from the workhouse, but knowing well whatever loss their proprietor might suffer would likely not last long, for boys so small and weak of constitution were known to not be long for this world. Having determined this, the man in the red clothes and powdered wig so left, his interest clearly only extending to the noted numbers on that paper, and nothing for the names that accompanied them.

 

There came about the day when the one named Vane was told his ninth birthday was to be upon him soon. Whether this was true or not he could not say, but nine was as good an age as any, he supposed. Of his group of boys he and the ones Epplett, Hollman and Rook were the only ones to remain, and Epplett, having once grown weak from his generous daily offerings of halfbread and broth, had graciously taken it upon himself to swoon and fall into the fire, thereby sparing anyone the burden of having to take upon them the cost of his existence, and even more graciously yet, sparing the workhouse from having to spend three pence. The boy Vane was of a more selfish nature, and hadn’t taken any particular considerations to the great burden he placed on society by having, due to a devilishly stubborn inclination, the refusal to simply die. And so it was that he was told that by the day of his ninth birthday he had but two options, make himself so desirable to any craftsman that would graciously take up the burden of him, or face existence out on the streets.

 

           The misfortune that had made Vane smaller than the other boys had a split pronged effect. The first was that no one would spend the absurd price of three pence on a workhand that was just as likely to die before he could make up his buying price. The second was that the only people to find some use of his existence were the other boys. The boy named Epplett had had a gentle nature, easier and more pliable than the boy Vane, who, though small, had a reputation for kicking and biting and spitting like some rabid rat caught against a corner, and ultimately proved to be more trouble than a fight was worth. But now Epplett was gone, and only Vane remained.

 

           In the mornings when their mistress found the boys passed out from drinking, it was Vane who got a thrashing for having cleared her stash. If asked, all boys would drunkenly swear on every Bible ever printed that they’d all seen him do it. In the mornings when their mistress found the pantry had been raided, it was Vane who was dragged into the snowy morning and got a thrashing for having stolen food from the other boys, and it was Vane who went without the barest minimum needed to survive. He’d learned not to scream, for screaming would only make her madder, and the thrashing would begin all over again. Once she told him he was lucky to have her beat him, for if her husband were still around, Vane would never have use of his legs again.

 

He knew their mistress knew the truth, and worse, he knew she did not care. For he knew the mistress saw only one thing. She saw the list the man in the powdered wig had written up. She saw the numbers, the tally of those numbers and their worth. Among the other boys she saw products of good build likely to fetch a price, their cumulative sum enough to restock her liquor cabinets thrice over. And in Charles she saw one product of inferior quality, one product whose upkeep was far more costly than its buying price.

 

One day the boys had come in late at night with an energy and enthusiasm most peculiar to them. Charles did not know the cause of their excitement, and frankly he knew it could not bode well. Indeed, as it would turn out, it was on that night that Vane’s life would change forever.

 

It was on that cold December’s evening that the boys came to the workhouse with a grand tale to tell. They spoke of smoky pubs and strange men who spoke of things stranger still, of the wide oceans and the creatures therein. Of beautiful women who enchanted men into a love so blind that men let themselves be dragged down into the abyss. Of grand monsters of black scales and black leather and keen eyes, a silver tongued demonic beast that stole men’s ships and crews. When all in the pub had called the men drunken liars, they had produced a bag of golden coins. This, they’d said, had come from an ancient civilization, a kingdom so rich in gold they built shining cities out of it. The men had come across a Spanish trading vessel leaving from that very city, and from it they’d stolen a ships worth of gold, an entire vessel’s worth of those very coins.

 

           And so it only stood to reason, the boys thought, that if these men were telling the truth and they did, indeed, have a ship full of gold, then surely they wouldn’t miss one measly little bag?

 

The boys, as it turned out, had been wrong.

 

And it was at that present moment when a loud knocking emanated from the downstairs. A certain prophetic doom seemed to fill the boys, and none of them seemed particularly surprised at what happened next, though they were nonetheless horrified. The men who came in were, indeed, like nothing Vane had ever seen before. If the man in red had descended from above with his perfume and fine clothes, these men had clawed their way from some abysmal bottom, neither man nor beast nor Gods but something in between. They called for the one who stole their money, and the boys and mistress alike were quick to sacrifice the smallest if only to appease these wrathful forces.

 

Charles had looked up then and the years of beatings and thrashings, of the betrayals and the lying caught up to him. His legs moved before he could think and he had tried to run for the door, but the men had stood in his way. It was the mistress’ precious liquor cabinet, so often the source of his grief, that had saved him. Though not strong, desperation can make miracles of even the weakest men, for Charles had just enough strength to push the accursed cabinet into the fire that had been the death of so many boys. The tower of wood and alcohol fell into the blaze and exploded in turn. Every window had been shut in an effort that had proven futile against the cold, yet proved incredibly effective in locking in the black smoke that poured from the fire. This smoke blinded the men and mistress and the boys and they doubled over, their lungs aching and eyes burning.

 

Each breath Charles took drew in lungfuls of the black smoke that choked at his chest and burned his throat, but it was his small size that kept him from being blinded by the smoke. He’d had just enough time to run outside into the freezing night to hear the roar and groans of wood behind him. The fire illuminated the snow that fell on this quiet English night and slowly lit the low grey skies a dusty orange. Charles beheld this hellish sight in a great and terrible silence.

 

A snap broke through the night, a loud cracking, tearing sound, and another, and another. The entire house seemed to be groaning in pain until it could stand it no longer and it began to collapse under its own agony. Indifferent, the snow continued to fall on the cataclysmic blaze. Even the screams that rang out as the fire began to jump from one house to another and to another seemed hushed by the quiet falling of the ice. There, embedded on the first stroke of snow to touch the frozen ground, did Vane see but a small yellow light. He bent forwards to pick it up, with screams echoing behind him, and found there a strange coin with drawings on it the likes of which he’d never seen before. And it was there on that fateful night, with the glow of fire illuminating the night sky, that for the first time in his life Charles Vane held in his hands a piece of gold.

 

In the following months, the streets proved harsh and unforgiving, mirthless as the grey skies and thrice as cold. This was a world where one did not seek help, for help given from one street child to the next was a meal that street child may never see again. So Charles watched, and Charles learned. If one wanted money, it only stood to reason that one had to find where money lived.

 

It was a city square like the many others he’d one day see across Europe, it had the same fountain at its centre, frozen and forgotten, and it had the same fencepost of tall narrow buildings with windows boarded against the outside world. And as with anywhere else, the wealthy lived in a world of their own, and this they did best by ignoring the existence of those different from them. Here Charles saw that the man in the powdered wig was not some anomaly of nature as he’d first believed him to be, quite the opposite- the man had been as faceless and nameless as the hundreds of other men in powdered wigs and fancy clothes he saw on the street. And like that one man they recoiled at the sight of him in turn. Some would discourage any sympathy from accompanying family members, graciously reminding them that such wretches spent their days in parish supported workhouses, drinking, gambling and wasting away the day at the expense of honest Christian men who worked for their living wages, thankyouverymuch.

 

And still it was the women that were the worst. It had gotten to the point where he was learning to steel himself at the sight of the full rustling skirts and ornate hair that served to announced to the world yet another wealthy woman. The men would display their revulsion by turning away. The women felt as though their display need match their clothing. The more elaborate their clothes, the more elaborately they’d display their distaste. Some would wrinkle their nose and stare down at him like something foul. Others yet would titter behind a fan and pretend the little thing simply did not exist, as though they could merely will the child out of existence.

 

And yet the worst of them were the ones who didn’t keep walking. It was those who stopped to fawn and flatter, those who tilted their heads and cooed with their ‘poor helpless little lamb,’ and their, ‘look at the poor little dove, so cold he looks.’ They’d drop a farthing at his feet, and just like that, whatever sympathy they’d had on their face would disappear. They would totter happily off to the ornate arms of their families, proud of a job well done and another Christian life saved and forgotten, no more than a blip on a day of shopping and outing.

 

Those so overwhelming with generosity so as to spare a halfpenny were satisfied enough in their own charity to turn away as quickly as they could, as though the minute the coin hit the cold ground, the unfortunate little reminder of the ugliness of the world had simply disappeared, and all was well again. It were as though to simply look at his eyes was to risk being contaminated by the same ill fate that had doomed the small child to such a miserable existence.

 

One dreary and grey day bled into another as Charles stood in the cold, snow dampened ground and pickpocketed and begged his way through the dark winter. His very existence now relied solely on the mercy and charity of people who looked right through him or turned their heads away from him in disgust or pity or both.

 

Between the workhouse and the streets, it so was that the young Charles Vane, in all his nine years of existence, had never known a shred of kindness. Never a kind word nor gentle touch, no warmth or safety.

 

And then it so happened that on a day like any other day, that is to say that it was cold and grey and dreary, a man happened by some street boys. Charles was among them, for it was a spot favoured by the street children exactly because it stood right outside the kitchens of a restaurant. Here the heat of the hearth warmed the bricks and the cold kept the thrown out food from rotting too fast.

 

This was a most unusual man, and could see quickly that these children had never known nought but coldness their whole lives. He saw fit to offer them each in turn a slice from a loaf of bread he carried for just such a purpose. When this they took with no small trepidation, the man did not turn away and leave as though his kind act now freed him from those six pairs of cold and hungry eyes.

 

The man went by the name of Dolus, and he had a strange gauntness about him, as though his clothes were merely held up by his spine, and everything else was just sinew and old fabric. Dolus promised the boys a warm evening and warm food in their belly, and that he knew of a place where the boys might find such luxuries.

 

That night Dolus took the boys to the dockyards, and it was the first time Charles Vane would ever lay his eyes upon the sea. He wasn’t particularly impressed, for on that chilly March evening, all there was to be seen was a large, ominous black expanse. The only sign of life in this was the sound of the crash and pull of water spraying against rocks. A lonely bell called out in the dark and the distant lights from ships disappeared into the black void.

 

A large ship had just come to port, and presently Charles could see a group of men unlike any other he’d seen walking on the pier. These men did not wear powdered wigs and bright coats like the surly noblemen. And yet nor were they like the men he’d seen that fateful night at the workhouse, large dirty men who reeked of salt and rum. These men were a species onto themselves. Their hair was neat and pulled back behind their necks, their uniforms a crisp and dark blue that looked almost black in the night. Even their movements were uniform, they all seemed to walk with the same straight back and tall neck, they all thrust their chests out imperiously and held their hands together behind their backs. The collective effect brought to mind some pigeons Charles had seen, thrusting out their chests and stepping this way and that as though lording over the world beneath them from their perch atop the rooftops. It were as though they lived completely ignorant of the fact that at the end of the day they were, in fact, just pigeons.

 

Dolus must have noticed Charles’s gaze, for he said, “Ah, you best be wary of them, lad. Thems are navy men, they are. One wrong move and they’ll have you locked up in Newgate, or worse—they’ll have you in one of their ships.” Indeed, this did not sound appealing to Charles, or at least it sounded about as appealing as becoming a pigeon himself. That was when Charles beheld another man among those Dolus called the Navy men. He slithered among them, slipping in and out of the darkness, a man more in line with the ones Charles had become acquainted with that fateful night at the workhouse. His features were hard to distinguish in the darkness, save for a large, unnatural stain upon the side of his face. It was a mark so massive and grotesque upon the tanned face so as to be seen from yards below at the level of the docks. This man handed something to the officers. The officers took this offering carefully, openly trying to avoid making any prolonged physical contact with anything produced by the marked man, as though it were repugnant to the touch.

 

As though he could feel the small child’s eyes on him, one of the Navy men turned. He scowled at Dolus and eyed the boys as one might the flies that have flown into their honey. He thrust his chin up into the air and turned from them in an indignant huff.

 

“Pay them no heed, boys, pay them no heed.” Dolus waved a bony half-gloved hand through the air, “You’ll forget about them soon enough.”

 

And in this Dolus did speak the truth. Whatever offense any of the boys may have felt was quickly forgotten. When Dolus opened the tavern door for the streetboys, it were as though the cruel dark night disappeared in a roar of laughter and blast of warm, festive light. A wall of sound hit the children as sure as any slap, a riotous cacophony of grown men singing and jeering among themselves. By the bar there stood a woman whose tight clothes had to strain to contain what must have easily been the largest set of tits any of those boys had ever seen. She shared a knowing glance with Dolus with the slightest nod of her head. With a flourish of her skirts, she opened her arms to the boys and lead them like long lost friends to a table she called the best in the house.

 

It was a spectacle of such dizzying speed that the boys had a hard time keeping up. There were rowdy songs and a king’s feast of food was laid out before them. There was suckling pig and custard pudding, fresh baked breads and onion pies, and a chaos of sweets and candies of every colour and shape. When Dolus showed up at the table with a selection of drinks, the boys did as they saw the other men do only too eagerly. It was Charles’s first taste of ale. What went through his mind then, what he thought of it, he would never be able to remember. What happened after that fated first drink, and what came next after that, too, all slowly sank into a dark blur, and the last sound Charles would recall of that most fateful night was the wild and mocking laughter of the tavern.

 

The world became cold about him and he had the most peculiar sensation of falling, falling, falling into some deep and terrible abyss, and all the while one phrase echoed with a resounding sadness in his mind, ‘I am alone.’

 

I am alone, his voice repeated in his mind. _I am alone_. And then there was darkness.

 

And indeed, he was alone.


	2. Prologue | 1689 | Hell At Sea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 1689
> 
> In which I relate to you the story of how one Charles Vane came to find himself in servitude. Relating too of his trials at sea, and his first meeting with the man going by the name of Albinus.

Prologue II:IV  
Hell at Sea  
1689

He woke he knew not where. He was surrounded by strangers, faces and people that seemed to fade into one unrecognizable mass. It was the strange rocking of the floor beneath him, the bizarre roaring sound outside that should have served as the first clues as to his current whereabouts. All around him there were other people, old and young alike. Here none could tell if it was night or day. Soon, each person came to the realisation that somehow they found themselves in the cruel and damp bowels of what must have been a ship, the great wooden casket half rotten and creaking in pain. It was the rattling of chains, the weight of a metal collar, the chafing skin under shackles that bore mute testimony of the grim reality no captive could give voice to. Their sole God-given possession, the one thing neither King nor Magistrate could take from them - the human freedom that was theirs by right under the laws of both man and God - was now no more.

It wasn’t long before the captives were hastened onto the sun-heated deck and told of their fates. There was an awed, hushed silence, save for a small, interspersed coughing. Their captain was a man by the name of Abaddon, a wicked man so hardened by the life of trading human lives for money that even his face bore upon itself a grotesque sort of twistedness, to the point of having discolouration upon the skin in the mark of a large purple stain upon his left cheek, in an area where even the hair there had refused to grow. This creature then told them they had been bought, and as they had not yet been sold, they presently did not exist. Their lives, as they had once known them to be, were now over. Their past selves, who they had been the night before, where they had come from, it was all over, as surely as if they’d died during the night. Hearing this, Charles felt a strange sort of detachment coming upon him. It was as though this ship became a vessel that had slipped beyond the veil of the human world, and now lingered in a purgatory from which the only escape was to become acceptable enough to be sold into a life of servitude.

Captain Abaddon was quick to point out that he was not in the business of making risky investments. And should any of his current investments so much as show a hint of untrustworthiness, their punishment would be of a most severe and brutal nature. It was on that ship that Charles Vane was told that in neither heaven nor hell, no act was more detestable, no sin more sinister, no treason more worthy of punishment than that most wretched evil of insubordination to one’s superiors. The key to prosperity was to know one’s place in life and in line, and the key to survival was to accept it as such. There was a strange, uneasy sort of silence among the captives, as though the captain had spoken in a riddle they couldn’t understand. For one day they had been men and women equal to all, if in liberty than nothing else, and now they awoke to find themselves slaves. Surely this couldn’t be so?

One of the captives was a large, broad shouldered man who had about him a sturdy and broad quality so that he gave one the impression of a large and immovable tree. This was a man Charles would later come to know as Thaddeus, the younger brother of a butcher who had fallen into heavy gambling debts. Thaddeus’ face had presently become red with outrage at the Captain’s outlandish claims. He looked the Captain in his eyes and asserted he was no servant nor property belonging to anyone but himself. He was a free citizen of England. Here he threatened that, should his liberties as a citizen under the King be in any way impeded, the King’s Navy would soon see that justice should be done. This impassioned monologue seemed to do naught but make the captain laugh. “The Navy, is it? You think the Navy is going to come rescue you?” Here he laughed all the harder, a mirthless sound born only from mockery. “The Navy has no interest in you, in any of you, and will be of no bother to me.”

This response did not seem to ease Thaddeus’ rage, much less force him into compliance. He called the captain a liar and demanded that he and the other captives be unchained at once, that this was a crime against their country and the subjects under the protection of the King. Abaddon was no longer laughing. Thaddeus held his head high and proclaimed that Abaddon had no right to claim himself captain of any free man who chose to reject him.

During this time, a man who Charles and indeed all the other captives would soon come to know as one Mr. Alford, had stood silently by. Mr. Alford was the one designated as the Boatswain, but what that position was or what it entailed was to remain a mystery to Charles for a long time yet. The Captain beckoned this man forward and demanded that he bring him a Cat-o-Ninetails. 

I must pause our tale for a moment, so that I may explain to you that, had this been an ordinary ship, it would not have been the Captain to wield the wretched whip. Rather, it fell upon the Boatswain to deliver punishment on the men when their behaviour so called for it. However, this, as with so many other things in the life of Charles Vane, was no ordinary ship. And so it was that fate should have it that Charles Vane’s first impression of a ship’s Captain should be a creature so anomalous in the sheer wickedness of his nature as one Captain Abbadon.

On first glance, the whip seemed innocuous enough to the street boy’s untrained eye. The article seemed to be no more than a large rope with many strands- each strand, once unravelled, bore upon its end nothing but a simple and innocent knot. 

The other men under the Captain’s employ seized Thaddeus at once. His large girth made for an impressive fight, and he had flung off three men before a group of five were finally able to subdue him and drag him to the mast, where he was chained so that his back faced the crew. It was in the hands of Captain Abbadon that that banal looking trinket, the article he had called a Cat-o-Ninetails, flourished to its vile and barbaric life. When first the lash was drawn against Thaddeus’ back, he did naught but fight back a grimace, refusing to make a sound. This must not have been what the Captain wished, for the man’s silence only seemed to beckon another lash, and another, and another. Soon the skin began to give under the rope, parting under each lash in large, angry red marks.

Charles watched, unable to turn away. On that day, so beautiful with the sun at its brightest and the sky so clear as to glow, Charles watched a man get flayed for the first time in his life. The man only gave the slightest shudder with each fall of the whip, but Charles soon found himself focused instead on the large man’s bound hands. Though Thaddeus remained silent, Charles could see the tips of his fingers turning purple, his nails digging more and more into his skin with each bite of the whip. Finally, as the Captain’s face became contorted with rage, and as blood began to pour freely down Thaddeus’ back, he, this gigantic man who had stood up to this most heinous monster, the fearless one who had stepped out of all the captives to demand justice, began to break under the lash. His large body buckled under the power of the whip, and finally his voice broke, choked between the lashes, and he begged for mercy. Abbadon told him he would have the man beg his Captain for forgiveness before he should be free. Thaddeus’ silence was taken as yet another act of insubordination, and within four strikes of the lash, the large man duly begged for his captain’s forgiveness.

And so began an interminable toil of months that seemed to stretch into eternity. The days were spent under a brutal sun that lorded over a mercilessly cloudless sky, a never-ending blue expanse that mocked them with the promise of infinity, of an eternity spent boiling under a blistering sun that refused to set.

The captives were made to work, not so much for their food, but for their right to not be flogged. For, you see, the Captain knew well what it is that the mixture of the hot Atlantic sun and desperation does to a man’s mind, so that after a while his reasoning starts losing touch with what it once was. Abbadon knew well that a threat of being sent overboard, of dying in the embrace of the ocean, soon came to hold a ghostly sort of allure, and that to use the threat of death so as to avert insubordination might prove futile. His were the kinds of punishment that made death seem, by comparison, merciful.

Rest, if it could be called such, only came when the captives became so exhausted so as to become sick, so overcome with work that they would lose whatever little nourishment they had in them on the decks of the ship. They were taken below deck which served as little comfort. To descend below decks was like entering into the stomach of a large, creaking, living, groaning, miserable creature. Over the years, the wooden floors and beams had become so saturated with blood and shit that the air itself became rank with it. The never-ceasing dripping of moisture, having become steam in this closed wooden oven, had little means of escape, so that on entering that area one had the impression of walking into a steamroom placed upon an outhouse. Even here there was little respite, between the roar of the ocean outside, the creaking wood around them, and the ever-present coughing belonging to some anonymous body lost in the masses.

There must have been fifty people there, men and women, children and old alike. Even with the constantly switching shifts it was still so crowded so that the rancid floor could scarce be seen. The air here, so clogged with humans stacked upon each other like crates - for that is what they were, in essence, crates of product to be sold - was so thick that Charles could taste the vile thing on his tongue, the smell of sour sweat and years of vomit from stomachs unaccustomed to the rocking sea. Each breath, each hacking cough, was felt by everyone.

The first weeks were the worst. His efforts become solely focused on becoming accustomed to that infernal rocking, up and down and up and down, and for once Charles found himself glad to have an empty stomach. And then, just as he had become used to that infernal rocking, it was his own body that betrayed him.

It is of a most pivotal importance that you remember that these people were born of a country where the sun, rarely seen though it was, always seemed so incredibly far away. Having been raised in such a place, they had never been exposed to the sun at the height of its raw power, and every sailor knows that it is the sun at high seas that burns most brutal. Charles was among the first made to endure the sun’s wrathful greeting by way of its violent embrace.

The malady must have started while they worked, chipping and painting at the deck or clearing the salt from the wood. It began as a strange sensation upon his head, as though his brains were cooking under his hair, which burned to the touch. This was easily ignored, and work resumed, lest the Boatswain suspect him of laziness. It was when night fell and exhaustion came, when his body hit the ground, that the full extent of the damage done during the reign of the sun began to make itself known.

It was a burn unlike any other. It started by manifesting itself in blisters, large angry pustules around the shoulders and back that made any position he took as painful as lying on a bed of nails, an sharp, incessant burning that nagged at him and kept him from sleep. The pain then spread to the bone, where every bone in the body felt like it was being crushed under a vise and twisted here, until the pain became so unbearable that the body began trying to purge itself of whatever so poisoned it. The little food the captives had been given was called hardtack, being biscuits made of flour and saltwater and an accidental helping of mealworms, and it was this that was purged first.

This was when the body was at its most merciful. For when it finished purging that, it began to purge itself of water. And then, having purged itself of water and still suffering from the poison that had been burned into the skin, the body kept trying to purge the toxin until it began to reject its own contents, an acidic mix of bile and other contents mysterious to name and foul to taste. An eternity after this, delirium began to set in.

Tossing and turning on the floor, Charles saw the ship disappear. He saw the faces of the men at that tavern, laughing and twisting into grotesque figures. He saw the boys at the workhouse, heard their laughter even as the fire burned around them and consumed them. Images flashed thus, half-forgotten memories, and the contrast of grotesque creations wrought from the darkest parts of his imagination.

Somewhere, his delirium briefly lost hold of him, for Charles found himself once more in that wretched ship. He opened his eyes, his body wracked with a burn that seemed to blossom from the depths of his bones, his nose and lips and forehead searing with such heat that each exhalation of breath burned as surely as though he drew each breath from the bowels of an oven. For the first time since before he could remember, Charles found himself regretful to see no one there when he opened his eyes. No one awaited him, no one to acknowledge that he had come to, no one to show a shred of happiness in seeing that he still clung to the thinnest thread of life. In those last moments of the fading innocence of his childhood, he so desperately wished that someone could be there, for even now, despite all the hardships he had endured, he could still feel fear, and he desperately did not want to be alone. His heart was thundering in his chest, and the heat within his body grew so unbearable that he was sure he must die then, and he regretted that he was surely to die alone.

He could hear that coughing again, this time louder, seeming to come from more places, but he could not spot its source. A large body lay next to him, wracked with coughs that shook their entire body. Charles could just barely make out a strange sort of rippling about the neck and ears, what looked to be large protrusions there. Charles tried to call out, but his throat burned as much as the rest of him, his mouth having gone dry and parched so that all he could manage was a hiss of a whimper. He tried again in the same wheezing, silent cry, and to no avail. His desperation for some kind of human contact, any kind of human contact, was unbearable. The figure next to him didn’t move. And so Charles let himself be drifted off back to unconsciousness, sure that this time, he would not wake up.

He was brushing away the fickle burning hand of his former mistress when the fire suddenly disappeared. No roar of laughter, no oppressive heat. There was an almost peaceful kind of silence. Charles found himself back on that dock, before being taken into the tavern and drugged. He saw himself, standing there among a gaggle of the other boys. And he saw himself staring intently at something. Once more he found himself staring at those men who, as Dolus had said, belonged to the Navy. He saw the odd man among them, the one who did not seem to fit. It was here with a distant, fading recognition, that Charles realised he knew that man. The face his younger self had stared at had been the face of his future Captain, the unique stain on his face all the more pronounced in the darkness. Without knowing it, Charles had watched the Navy receive from this most vile creature a clinking purse of stained leather, heavy with something. And he had watched as the Navy men had looked down on those small souls who, in less than one day’s time, would be tied up at the bottom of that captain’s ship, bound and damned.

Days after Charles first wished for the sweet relief of a quick death, he was instead taken into the arms of a quick and uneasy unconsciousness as his body ran out of energy in trying to save itself. If he felt pain, he no longer had the energy to even notice it. It was a blissful, dreamless darkness.

Of the heat sickness, some of the captives did not stop when the bile began. Some found that after their bodies purged itself of its own produced fluids, it kept going, until the weakest among them began to vomit blood. All the other captives quickly came to know what was ahead, when first they spotted those dreaded red bursts. It wouldn’t be long until another body was to be thrown into the sea. And after some time passed, some people found themselves envious, and that red splatter, so dreaded once, became secretly coveted as the only way out of this unforgiving hell. But they would not be the last to die on this most wicked voyage.

It was with no small amount of horror that Charles found himself opening his eyes after what seemed like an eternity of agony. He lay in a pool of sweat and vomit, but he still breathed, the steady rising and falling of his chest almost mocking him. His vision focused. The silent form next to him, his silent and faceless companion who had been deaf to his cries, must have turned to him while he was unconscious. Yet, Charles could not shake off the feeling of something peculiar in this scene. He listened in silence. He could hear the crashing waves. He could hear the creak of the ship. But something was gone.

It was the coughing. The coughing had stopped.

As had the talking. The snores. The muted chatter. The sound of many people breathing as one. It was all gone. There was only the sound of the waves, and the groaning of the ship.

It was then when Charles noticed that the figure next to him was staring right at him. A terror unlike any other began to loom over him. The person’s eyes were unseeing. To judge by the milky quality that had settled over the eyes, the sunkeness of the cheeks, the grey and blue colouration of the skin and the buzzing of flies that landed undisturbed on the person’s skin, they hadn’t seen anything for quite some time now.

Charles’s throat still burned too much for him to scream, and with great effort he turned on his side. Another face stared unseeing at him, this face having once belonged to that great man from the first day, the man he had known as Thaddeus, the man who had refused to bend the knee to their wicked captain. His jaw had fallen open in death so that his face looked as though it had been frozen in a scream. The illusion of post-mortem agony was only made all the more vivid by the way the skin around his eyes had begun to peel back, giving his rotting eyes a wide, terrified look.

Too weak to even tremble in fear, surrounded by death as he was, Charles tried telling himself that those wide, unseeing eyes next to him should have made him feel lucky. He was blessed, even, at having been somehow chosen to survive. He presently had a hard time seeing things that way.

His first reaction to the macabre scene around him had been of terror, panic, and fear, so that he was so overcome as to be wholly unable to move beyond forcing his eyes shut. After sleepless hours in the company of the dead, with his body rendered too weak to move, Charles had simply laid there, looking into the eyes of the dead until the sight became as normal as if he stared at the ceiling, and the very visage of death becoming more and more ordinary, so that he was no longer able to connect this rancid body with any particular emotion, any more than he could the ceiling around him or floor beneath him.

They found him thus, then. When Abbadon’s men could no longer avoid the pit of the ship that had become so drenched with death and disease. It was as though the air itself had become sickly, hovering over that scattering of grey and unmoving bodies. The few survivors had ran for the door when first they’d spotted the rays of sunlight, their first taste of fresh air in weeks. All, that is, but one. The men did not know what to make of the boy. That small boy, made all the smaller by the hardships of his voyage, was one of the sole survivors of an epidemic of smallpox that had been brought among those particular quarters. While the other inhabitants of the ship had toiled under the Atlantic sun, few had known of the carnage that had been locked beyond their sight, lest the plague spread further and diminish what little profit there might still be made. And so it was that he had sat there as still as the dead themselves, the only evidence of life the blazing intensity of his eyes. 

It was estimated that the boy had spent at least two weeks among the bodies of the dead, having been spared from sharing their fate by the condition that had made his body burst into an intense fever brought on by the long hours under the sun and meagre ration of water.

The mysterious condition that had both been the source of such grief to Charles and yet had served as his painful key to salvation was the affliction some sailors and fishermen refer to as Sun Poisoning. This would not be the last time Charles Vane would suffer that particular fate. There is a reason, you see, some sailors pride themselves in their dark complexion, for it is proof that they have survived this experience not once, not twice, but many times, so many times that their body, prompted to either change itself or suffer this affliction in perpetuity, adapted to it by taking upon itself a permanently darker hue than its possessor was born with. This was something that could never be called a mere tan, but rather a metamorphosis of the body, or a permanent mark of the sun and sea claiming that particular body as their own creation. Be a man born white or black or red or brown, it made no difference to the sea.

The boy was taken to Abaddon’s quarters and presented to him as some strange anomaly. Though Charles did not speak, the crewmen had been able to discern some aspects of his most disturbing journey. How he had lived while all those around him died. How he had woken and, with neither food nor water, how he had lived among the dead without so much as a scream. 

This the Captain heard with a twisted sort of pride. He neared Charles and forced his head up so that he could stare down at the boy’s sunken face. A vile, greasy smile slithered onto the man's face. "That this puny little runt should survive." He chuckled through blackened teeth. "There must be something special about you, boy." In essence, it was the first compliment Charles had ever received in his life. And yet he could not notice it, for standing there in the Captain’s quarters, being made to look the man in the face, Charles found himself drawn to most peculiar notions and daydreams. Standing there, he wondered what it would feel like to kill this man. Would he smile, then?

The ship’s doctor, if he could be called such for in reality he was more a drunkard with a butcher’s knife, prescribed that the child should be washed off with a rag, given some water and crackers, and returned to duty.

No part of his body was spared from the sun’s cruel tests of his fortitude. After hours working on deck, Charles became increasingly aware of a sharp pain. His feet ached as though each step he took was on a bed of knives. The wood cooked under the cruel Atlantic sun, getting so hot that actually catching aflame seemed to become pointless. Once the captive’s tender feet hit the roasting deck, their skin burned on contact. Their feet were pressed against the boiling ground by the weight of their own bodies until the skin that bore upon the sun drenched wood exploded into beds of blisters that made each step one took a fiery torture.

The pain was such that it occupied every thought on a person’s mind. Yet Charles beheld something far more important than any physical pain. When he looked up from the floor he scrubbed, he saw him then. The Captain, standing idly near the railings of the ship, staring out distractedly at the ocean beyond. Without a thought going through his mind, as though driven by forces beyond human understanding, Charles got to his feet, every pain forgotten. He walked toward his Captain. He knew then, he would kill him. He thought nothing of consequence, he thought nothing of his own suffering, he thought nothing of the dead that had surrounded him, he thought nothing of the rotting corpse of Thaddeus. He didn’t think at all. His mind was blank, his whole life reduced to a single purpose: to shove that man overboard. To watch him fall. To watch him drown. To see what it would be like to look upon his face as life drained from him. To see if he would smile or laugh then.

A high scream tore Charles out of his trance. Both he and the Captain turned towards its source. When one of the boys keeled over, for the pain in his feet had become too much to bear, he was dragged to one of the masts upon which he was tied. Presently he was screaming, begging for mercy. There was a mindless rush on deck, as the captives were gathered to watch the brutal scene. Charles’ plans would not come to be. He looked to the Captain, and a most peculiar expression came about Abbadon’s face. Looking at the boy’s blank expression, at the cold, hard look in his bright eyes, it was as though the Captain had caught a glimpse of the fate he had just nearly missed. Surely, thought the Captain, he was mistaken, driven somewhat mad by the sun itself. For this was just a small boy. And yet, as the boy turned from him, Abbadon could not shake off the feeling that he had just narrowly escaped something most terrible.

The Boatswain was a very different man from the captain. He had a cold, hard and austere presence, and was what sailors would call a good boatswain, for though it was his job to whip and punish the captives, he seemed to take no particular joy in this. That is not to say that he pitied them or offered any sort of help or mercy, rather that he engaged in his job with a silent and grave form of dignity. At sea, this was the behaviour of a kind boatswain, and kind boatswains were very rare creatures indeed.

The captives were gathered around their brother to watch the punishment for idleness lest they too should decide to indulge in laziness. The boatswain flourished his whip. Charles watched in mute testimony as the whip snapped back and cracked down upon the other boy’s back over and over again until the skin disappeared under torrents of blood, so much blood. A terrible silence befell the deck as though even the sea itself stood quiet to watch. There was only the crack of the whip, the wet hit of skin, and the boy’s terrible, terrible cries.

Abbadon had watched Charles during the proceeding. Watched his blank face as it refused to give any sort of indication as to his thoughts or reactions, if any even existed in this strange little child. The whipping ceased, the screams fading into silent sobs. Staring at Charles, Abbadon commanded the Boatswain not to untie the unfortunate victim of the lash. He ordered Mr. Alford to leave the boy there in the sun, without food and only the slightest allowance of water, for two days and two nights. Let him serve as an example, he said. Charles stared at the wide eyed, horrified boy. His face betrayed no reaction.

And so it went, this brutal dance, day in, and day out. Not a minute of hesitation, not a roll of the eyes, not a glimmer of resilience escaped the ever-watchful eye of their boatswain, and so the captives filled every minute they could with work, day in and day out until the days bled together. Where once the days had been cold and dreary and grey, they were now boiling, oppressive and brutally bright.

All around them was nothing but the wide, mocking expanse of blue water that lapped greedily at the ship and spit at its crew with that foul and salty spray. Night bought no respite, for any boy that was not sick from exhaustion was made to help those men in charge of the ship at night. It was then that Charles thought he could see them in the glimmer of starlight on dark waves, the souls of those nameless men who had come before him.

Where had they gone, and had they ever come back?

And finally there came - after what appeared to have been years but had more likely been a mere scattering of months - upon the horizon the long thin promise of a destination. What awaited him there, Charles knew not, but he told himself not to fear, for whatever he found on that blessed gash across the horizon could be the lowest pit of hell and it would still be a paradise compared to that accursed ship. Nothing, thought he, could be worse than that horrible barge and the hellish time he spent there.

Here the water, once a deep and menacing blue, began to lighten. Blue filtered to green, and the green began to grow lighter and lighter until the water was so transparent as to make the ship appear to be flying. Unfortunately there was not much time for gawking at this most breathtaking sight, for soon the boatswain was upon him and he was given his orders.

They made port at a small, decrepit excuse for a deck of rotting wood and long decayed rope. As they were unloaded off the ship, Charles got his first look at this new world. The sun here too was merciless, and the land seemed to be melting and dripping with steam. Before him there loomed the edge of a jungle, its jaws opened wide in a roar of crooked trees and spiked brambles. Mysterious creatures made sounds from deep within the place where the greenery turned pitch black, even while the sun hung up in the sky.

The captives were presently ordered on deck as they had been that first day. Here, their most piteous lot in life was explained to them. They had been bought, each and every one of them, for a price. They owed the Captain the price at which they’d been bought. This price he would recoup once each individual was sold. The debt they owed to the Captain who bought them would then be transferred to their owner, the price being set at whatever price their owner had spent in their purchase. To this price would be added the cost of their keep, the cost of their food, and any other expenses their owners should be made to endure in keeping them. Were they to be good servants, fastidious and obedient, meek and servile, avoiding any further expense on their master’s behalf, the time would come that their work would repay their buying price, and at that time they should find themselves free once more.

Once their fate and lot had been told to them, they were allowed to disembark. They were taken to the mouth of the deck, there lined up like cattle before a growing throng of the island’s residents. They were a handful of men so covered in grime and dirt so as to be almost uncorecognisable from each other, with smatterings of slaves, white and black alike. Here, Charles witnessed one of the few scenes in his life that could be remotely described as being of a happy nature.

One of the young boys on the ship had gone by the name of Isaiah. Isaiah had survived the plague due to his position as an aide to the doctor, a position earned from having at one point in his life learned to read and write. It was one of the slaves of the island, a white boy around Isaiah’s age, who recognised him. Upon seeing each other, both boys were seized with delight. The slave boy turned to his master and pleaded that he should bring Isaiah along, for the two boys had been raised together in a Workhouse outside of Liverpool. He did not even think to make any appeals upon his master’s emotions, any pleas for his master’s mercy. Instead, he raved about how Isaiah had been a most obedient boy, a most fastidious and hard-working child, and how he had excelled in the written arts, so that he would make a good investment for any Master. This boy’s argument, along with a rare sort of softness to the heart, endeared Issiah to the Master, and Isaiah was the first to be bought.

Charles watched this scene with detached interest, but a sinking feeling in his chest. In all the crowd that was coming to throng at the beach, there was no one who knew or cared for him. Even had he not set the workhouse on fire, there would be no familiar voice to greet his ears, no person happy to see him. There was a feeling of utter desolation in his heart, and he knew not why. After all, how could he long for that which he had never known?

The remaining servants were lined up, and Abbadon, who had scarce showed any interest in their lives, took it upon himself to extoll their virtues to his dirty audience, who looked unconvinced at the meagre and malnourished selection brought before them.  
The black slave was a conniving creature, Abbadon barked. Treacherous, he said, having in him no understanding of loyalty. You could show him nothing but kindness, make of him as your own family, and he would still not pass up a chance to slit the throat of you and your family in the night! But these - he flourished a gesture at the other captives - these are good, White men, born of a goodly God fearing nation.  
Circumstances lead them to stumble across a most unfortunate path. They now came before the good men of the Island looking to repent for their wrongdoings by leading a life of hard work and learning the joy that comes from the feeling of having accomplished something and contributed to the community.

The Island’s scant population were invited to inspect these lost lambs of God and speculate upon their worth. The captives were handled with little consideration given towards even the most basic sense of human dignity and respect, turned this way and that, made to walk up and down so as to be inspected for any signs of lameness, contorted and bent over so the buyer could inspect each and every mark and wound that might in some way affect the person’s value as a source of labour.

Time and time again Charles would be pulled aside, being told to stick out his arm or leg, being there pinched so that a buyer could test for signs of any musculature whatsoever. Though working on the decks had already begun to change him from the street boy who’d haunted frost-bitten streets, he was still comparatively small, and the meagre diet he had been fed along with the long periods of purging his body had been through made it so that even here and now he was still among the smallest and most unvalued, just as he had been at the workhouse.

But something had indeed begun to change within him, only it was he who could not see it.

It was that day that Charles Vane would first lay eyes on the man he’d know as Albinus. Whether the man had a last name was as mysterious as whether the man was even of the mortal realm. Even among these Island men, with their bloodthirsty eyes and beastly musculature, Albinus stood out. He was less beast than he was some kind of a walking mountain, a horrible colossus that thundered over everyone around him, his bright eyes flashing from deep within dark eye sockets. He stepped out from among the other men and stepped towards Charles. For one moment, the child was sure he was about to be plucked up in a giant hand and eaten right there and then.

Charles would always remember that moment. How, when Albinus stepped towards him, it wasn’t a scrawny arm he grabbed, a protruding rib he poked, but how that large dirty hand had shot out at his chin and yanked his face up so he could look in his eyes.  
There was a muttering of disagreement among Albinus’ men behind him. The boy is too small, they said. Too scrawny. Be dead in a week, said another voice. Not worth the price of the food he’d need. To these arguments, Albinus tipped his head back and roared with laughter. “And what do you fucking halfwits know? I bought all you fucking women when you were smaller than he!” He looked down then, and Charles got his first look at those blazing, terrifying eyes the colour of lighting. He clenched his jaw in the man’s grip, refusing to look scared. “This one will do just fine, oh yes,” Albinus grinned.

“There’s fire in his eyes!” And here he laughed again, a sound like rolling thunder.

And that was the day when Charles Vane came under the care of Albinus and his men.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edits kindly and thoroughly provided by [](http://musyc.dreamwidth.org/profile)[musyc](http://musyc.dreamwidth.org/)


	3. Prologue | 1689-1694 | Of Bondage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Accounting of Charles Vane's time spent in servitude to Albinus.
> 
> "The point of the game, the child reasoned, was to get to a higher number than the time before. When he cried out, the foreman had won. But if he could take a flogging in silence, then it was he who had won the game. Upon that particular day, Charles had gotten to seventeen. By the time he left the Island, Vane would be able to count to one hundred and thirty eight."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Due to the graphic nature of this chapter and the contents herein, this chapter is rated 18+ for:  
> Disturbing Imagery, TW: Illness, TW: Death, TW: Flogging, TW: Animal Cruelty, TW: Child Abuse

Prologue III:IV  
Of Bondage

1689-1694  


And so it is that we now come to one of the most horrific parts of this our most dreadful tale. It is here that I must beg you, fair reader, to forgive me, for the sheer barbarity and horror of those years that Charles Vane spent in that most wretched Island still give me such pause so that I find myself hesitating in relating those most detestable events to you even now. 

It is an unfortunate truth, however, that to understand the barbarous and often times irrational acts of Charles Vane, one must take into consideration the events of those most bloody years, for they formed for Captain Vane what ordinary boys in civlised society regard as their formative years. In light of this, I will try my best to convey to you the story as it was told to me, so that you might seek to understand the mentality of the man history shall forever remember as nothing but a wretch of the seas, that damnable butcher. From these events it is my hope that we might gleam to understand what it is that transforms one mortal individual from man to beast, and see there how one comes to define himself by such a profound contempt for human life and utter disregard for its sanctity. 

We begin this chapter as the man named Albinus began to ferry the children he had purchased through this most hateful island. It should be noted that it was not usual for a man of Albinus’ standing to go and make such a purchase himself, for, as Charles would later come to know, Albinus was of a certain high rank on this Island. Though laws did not stretch this far out into the ocean, men here still abided by the one universal law: He who earns the most makes the rules. His ranking, however, seemed of little importance to Albinus, and he still insisted on being present for his purchases of human flesh and bone lest anyone try to swindle him with a product of inferior quality.

They made their way through that dense, hungry jungle where death and trade lived side by side with creatures that lurked in the shadows and hunted at dark. The shore and ocean disappeared behind them as they sank further and further into that lush, clammy catacomb. Strange animals cried and screamed, hidden by writhing mangroves that slithered on top of each other into an impenetrable cage as though nature itself were trying to ward off intruders. The air hung low and foul, so that soon Charles and the other boys found themselves smothered by their own sweat. Soon they were surrounded by buzzing insects that thirsted for blood and carried within them death and disease. These vile creatures were born of streams of thick, stagnant water that congealed into a dense and foul mud that was said to have eaten grown men whole. No matter where Charles looked, there was no means of escape. Everything around him was as dangerous as the large man who was leading him further and further into this underworld. 

It was as the jungle began to thin and part that he felt it then, a strange apprehension making its way down the line of children, like ripples in the water. Without a word being spoken, every child knew then that something terrible was waiting for them up ahead. They walked in silence until they saw it. 

He hung off a branch of the mangrove trees, being no more than twelve or thirteen. His body had already gone grey, but his eyes were wide in death. The body had been left there to give the children a warning, make their imagination associate such a horrific sight with the consequence of insubordination.

The reality was far worse, for later Charles would learn that that boy had not been hung there in punishment. Rather, it had been he who had chosen this most terrible fate. No one could say why. It was only the taskmaster who shrugged and brushed the act off. The sun must’ve gotten to him, he said.

And so it was that the boys arrived at Albinus’ fields, whereupon he had cleared a large lumber yard. In the previous years he had added the sugar cane to his growing enterprise, using the lands he’d stripped of lumber as fields for the new crop. Presently there could be seen large swatches of young men working in those fields, silent save for the sound of their machetes hacking at the foot of the cane. Charles could not help but stare, for he could see of those boys their every rib, every twist of sinew and cartilage and little else more save for skin. The overall effect was that the boys looked as though they’d been left out in that field to dry and shrink upon themselves, like the tough slices of meat left in smoking pantries through the winter. Even as they worked, each had an iron collar about his neck and was connected together to his brother by a large, black chain that swung between them with each fall of their machetes. Whether they had come to the Island as white children or black children, it no longer made a difference. Their shared suffering and joint servitude under the grueling sun had made them as equals - being now indistinguishable from one another -- in some cruel parody of an utopian ideal. 

One of the boys stopped to turn to something at his feet, and here Charles could make out a strange anomaly in that child’s back. A strange way the light hit the boy’s back in a way it didn’t elsewhere on its body in large, criss-crossing lines.

The children were lead to wait outside a shabby hut made of logs. Though it had no windows, the boys had no trouble distinguishing what went on inside, for the crevices between the logs were large enough to allow anyone to see what went on behind the walls. A large beam of splintering wood stood at the center of the room, unremarkable save for a hook that hung from its top. Against the wall there hung various instruments, paddles of all kinds, whips, the whip that Charles had come to know as the Cat-O-Ninetails could also be accounted for. Among them there was one object that didn’t seem to belong—a large, black iron rod, having about it the effect of the poker the mistress had once used to poke at the fireplace. There was no fireplace that Charles could see, but only a pit in the ground where a fire had just been started. The man inside that cabin went to the tools and picked the strange poker Charles had been staring at, and this he set above the fire.

Ajax, of whom much will be said during the remainder of Charles’ time in captivity, was a stout, heavybellied man with a dull, drawn looking face. He had about him a nervous, irritated nature, as though he lived his life in a constant state of agitation. Ajax had been an acquaintance of Albinus in his younger years at sea, and that was how he now found himself working under Albinus in the capacity of taskmaster. 

To any enterprise involving the servitude and enslavement of men in order to produce a profit, a creature such as an taskmaster is inevitable. As the name implies, it is his job to oversee the workhands, and to ensure their utmost productivity and output. This the taskmaster usually does by encouraging the men with an array of tools such as whips, lashes, canes, pistols and a host of savage dogs he keeps near him. It is a job that inevitably breeds brutality and cruelty, even among those who might previously not have been in possession of these most terrible qualities. If the taskmaster is to do his job, being defined as his ability to produce the highest quantity of crops or lumber, then he tells himself it is only to his benefit to cease seeing the slaves as people to be pitied and instead to see them as cattle that need to be disciplined.

When Ajax came out of the hut, he called to the boys, and then to the Driver. The driver - who was one of the few slaves so privileged so as to be known by his given name of Matthew - was a solid, well built boy of about fifteen years of age, who had about him a contemptuous, arrogant quality that manifested in a perpetual sneer that had become engraved on his face. 

A driver is usually a slave picked out to work under the taskmaster. How he is picked is a mystery. Some argue that it is a role based in merit, others favouritism. As the boys grew into pubescence and became increasingly aware of the lack of women on the Island, they came to develop their own theory about how it was that a driver was picked, for it was considered a very fortunate position indeed. While it was their job to whip the boys and ensure punishment was met, it was also their job to distribute the food, and the drivers had their first pick of the meals. Mind you, unlike taskmasters, it was not inherent to all drivers that they should possess about them that cruel shred of heartlessness. 

In following Albinus in his affairs with other nearby farms and plantations, Charles would come across many drivers who never forgot what it was to be a young slave, and did their best to spare their fellow brothers of too much suffering at the end of a whip. Charles would even come to know of a boy who had so mastered his handling of a whip that he would urge the boys to cry and scream as though they were ablaze, even while his whip always managed to come within mere milimetres of their back. The drama of the boys’ cries and the flourish of this driver’s whip was just enough to convince the slave master of the efficacy of his driver’s punishment, while sparing the boy too much suffering.

Charles, however, had no such luck, for Matthew was not one such driver. He took to the job with utter and complete willingness, and Ajax would often boast that it were as if the boy had been born for it.

Matthew ordered the boys away from the cabin, and kept them in his sight, making sure none got too near the cabin. Ajax took one of them at random, an elbowy lad with fire red hair, and lead him into the cabin. A few minutes passed. 

And then the screaming began.

The boy did not come out. Ajax, however, did. And he took another boy with him. The first boy had not yet stopped screaming when the next child’s cries rang through the night. Matthew waited until the boys were so petrified so as to be immobile to explain what was happening. He told them they were now the property of Albinus. Their job was to work, and if they worked, they got to eat. They were each easily replaced and their lives of no particular consequence. The brand that they were about to receive was a mark that showed the world they were owned property. No matter how hard they may try to escape, the brand would always remind them they were property. Everyone, Matthew added, on that Island, knew and feared Albinus. No one would risk their life, or even their time, by aiding any escaped slaves. 

Here now the first boys began leaving the hut, too weak to go far. They’d been stripped of their shirts, and there, on the back of their left shoulder, he could see the mark. The mark of ownership.

There was a strange, building sound in Charles’ ears, so much so that even the screams began to fade away. He watched each boy be lead in, having no mark upon them, being their own. He watched each boy crawl out, weak and disoriented, hoarse from screaming, a blistering red brand smoking on their flesh.

His heart had been pounding in his chest, but now it seemed to slow down, as the pressure in his ears rose. It occurred to Charles then, that everything bad that had ever happened to him, every injustice he had been made to suffer, had happened as he’d sat back and watched. In some way, he had always believed that were he good, were he quiet, were he obedient, someone would take it upon themselves to reward his good behavior. That maybe if he just waited long enough, providence would show him a way out. Yet after nine years of servitude, here he stood, on a hellish Island in the middle of nowhere. He was about to allow himself to be marked as a slave for the rest of his life, simply accepting every mistreatment, every abuse, as the inevitable fate of his life. Even now, he was still the orphan in a workhouse, living only so long as his mistress failed to kill him, living only so long as the other boys allowed him to live. Once that brand hit his skin, that would be his life forever – not belonging to him, but at the behest of another, to be done away with as soon as they grew tired of him.

And so it was - with these thoughts running through his head - that when Ajax came to fetch Charles, that he glared up at the man and bore his teeth as a wild animal. This had no effect on the man, and when he saw that the boy would not come easy, he grabbed for the back of the boy’s neck as one does an errant mongrel. Ajax hoisted Charles into the air but the boy so kicked and fought and bit and twisted that Ajax lost his grip, and Charles fell to the ground. He had no particular plans of escape, but he had no intention of being a branded slave, and so he ran.

He didn’t get far. 

The other boys watched in pity as a few of the older freemen who worked on Albinus lumber yard lunged for the small child. For one moment, the boys on the fields stilled, their hearts going out to a boy who had yet to lose his fight, who still believed he had something to hope for. Every boy on that field had once been like that, whether they’d fought until they were whipped beyond fighting, or whether they’d spent nights nursing plans of escape until the viciousness of reality proved time and time again the utter futility of hope on that island, they could all relate to him. But they had all learned better. And as they heard the screams and struggles of the nameless boy, they returned to their work, lest the driver catch them idle.

It took two men to get the boy into the cabin. But that was merely the start of their trouble. When they tried to wrestle him down, Charles kicked over and over again, catching one of the freemen in the groin and sending him howling back. The other freeman drove his fist against Charles’ cheek with so much force that the boy’s teeth cut into his skin and he spit blood, but still he did not stop struggling. One man wasn’t enough, for whenever he caught the boy’s arm, a leg would break free, and whenever he’d pin down a leg, an arm would break free. He twisted his shoulders, his hips, no part of him stopped, as though the child were simply beyond feeling exhaustion. Eventually the other man recovered, and now having a personal vested interest in seeing the boy suffer, he and his cohort were able to bind the boys wrists. Albeit, it should be noted, with no small amount of effort.

The boy was still kicking and twisting when they raised his bound wrists to the top of the pole, hanging the rope from the hook there. The hook was high enough that Charles’ feet hovered over the floor, his entire weight going to his wrists. His shirt was torn off his body so that his skin became bare. Convinced that the boy had been subdued, the freedmen stood back to watch the boy meet his fate. Ajax went to the fireplace. 

Charles pulled his shoulders this way and that, but the rope would not budge, and neither would the hook. But there was something. The wood had groaned against the struggle, and he could see now that that wood had grown rotten with humidity. Metal rattled behind him as the brand was put to the fire. Charles braced himself and pulled himself up by the hook, the muscles in his arms straining with pain. He planted his feet at a point in the middle of the wooden beam, where the wood gave to pressure. The freemen began to laugh at the absurdity of the boy’s futile plans. Charles shoved his feet against the rotting wood and pulled at the rope and hook.

Ajax told the freemen to calm down. There was the scraping sound of metal on metal, and Charles could feel movement behind him.

And then there was a crack.

The freemen stopped laughing. Even Ajax stopped. Charles felt his heart flutter but knew if he stopped now he’d be doomed. He doubled, tripled his efforts, pushing against the wood with all his force. And then he felt it- the wood gave beneath his feet. Another crack. And next thing he knew, Charles was tumbling back. The wooden beam fell after him with a crash, crushing the air out of his chest. There was a brief moment of stunned silence where Charles managed to free his bound wrists from the hook, and took off.

Night had fallen in the camp, and he knew not where he ran off to. His antics had so caught the freemen off guard that they hadn’t even given chase yet. The forest loomed in front of him, as inviting as it was ominous. He still had no plans, he hadn’t even had time to acknowledge his success yet.

Maybe that should have been his hint. The forest stopped. His feet were no longer hitting the ground. Once again he was hoisted into the air. When he whipped his head around with a mad frenzy in his eyes did he see him. That inhuman figure that held him in his clutches. Like a wrathful god, Albinus stared at him. Nothing in his expression gave his thoughts away. No anger nor amusement. Albinus could have looked the living incarnation of wrath right then, it didn’t matter- Charles kept fighting, twisting and writhing as he had earlier. A large, heavy fist made solid contact with his stomach, knocking the wind out of him and taking the fight with it. 

It was Albinus who took him back to the cabin. He yelled at his men for being such women so as to be overcome by a child. He threw Charles down so that his back smashed against the muddy ground and again knocked the air from him.

“You put up a good fight, my boy, I’ll give you that.” Charles glared up at him and began to rise, but Albinus’ booted foot came down on the middle of his chest and held him pinned to the ground. Albinus looked to his men and commanded that they bring the brand to him. Charles didn’t even look at the brand. He fixed his eyes on Albinus’. 

“I am not your boy,” he spat.

And here Albinus did laugh, “Are you not?”

“My name is Charles Vane and I am not your boy nor am I anyone else’s boy.”

“Yes, my boy. You are.” And here Albinus plunged that most wretched thing, that most inhuman instrument of a brand, against the young boy’s chest, over his heart. Pain shot through the boy’s bones, down his spine so violently that his back arched against Albinus’ boot. Charles dug his teeth into his bottom lip and so tensed his jaw that it hurt, but he would not allow himself to scream. “Let this remind you of your place.” Albinus pushed the brand harder against the boy so that the skin there sizzled audibly under the scorching iron. Still, Charles would not give in. Albinus twisted the brand in place, and finally Charles gave. A scream tore from his throat. Albinus released him then, standing over the boy in triumph. His foot left the boy’s chest and Albinus stared down at him. The small chest rose and fell in quick breaths, like a mouse driven to exhaustion after a chase.

“You belong to me now, boy. If you fight, it is because I tell you to. And if you die, it is only because I allow it so.” 

And here the boy was dragged out of the cabin, exhaustion finally having caught up to him. 

He couldn’t recall being taken to the cabin, nor could be recall going to sleep. Darkness had simply claimed him. The next day the boys were dragged out by the sound of a bell, and told that their lives now revolved around that bell. When that bell rang, they were to be on their way to the fields, or at the fields. If they weren’t, they’d be punished. Any and all acts of insubordination would result in punishment.

And here it was that the events of the previous night returned. It was Charles who was picked out to serve as an example of what happens to those who act in insubordination. He was lead to a beam, much like the beam inside the cabin, though this one stood in the center of the cabins so all could see. There was a hook, as there had been in the previous night. 

It was Ajax who looked down at the child.

“Will you fight?”

And here Charles offered no response save for a glare. At this, Ajax called to Matthew. His chest was still burning, and Charles was now too weak to fight. His wrists were bound as they had been, and he was hung from the hook as he had been, his bare back exposed to the world. There was a brief pause, as though the world had stopped to take a breath. Charles could hear a gaggle of birds singing themselves into the dawning morning. There was a sound, then. Oh, how my flesh crawls to have to recount such wretched wickedness, that followed so shortly after the inhumane branding of a child!

There was that crack in the air. And so it was that the taskmaster took it upon himself to ply that lash without mercy upon that poor wretch’s body. Strike after strike, lash after lash, that the child took in silence until it was that he felt sure that his skin would part and his bones give way were the lash to strike any more. He had told himself he would not cry, but the pain became too much for the young boy to bear. He screamed for mercy as the lash bit at him and he hated himself for it. He screamed for mercy when his head rang with pain as blood poured freely down his back and he hated himself for it. But no matter how great his hate grew, the pain was too strong. It was as the energy was draining from him that the lashes stopped, and that most brutal lesson concluded.

Despite their brutal treatment, it was wholly expected of the boys to return with all due promptness to work soon after their release. Charles’ back was still bleeding when he was informed he was to be put to work in the lumber yard.

This Matthew did not take well at all. For the lumber yard was considered something of a privilege to be worked up to among the boys. The work there required infinite dexterity and held gruesome ends for the poor soul who found his attention drifting for the merest second, but it was still considered immeasurably better than working out in the cane fields. Where a man may lose life or limb working at the lumber yard, there is still some privilege to working under the shelter of the canopy of trees and becoming acquainted with the freemen who were in charge of operations. The cane fields held no such benefits. It was cruel work under that brutal sun, and even the most fastidious field hand could easily find himself at loss for limb or felled by dehydration. That Charles - a small boy, and a recent arrival who had already earned himself a flogging – should be elevated to such generous conditions was absurd to the driver, who protested hotly over the injustice.

Still, Albinus paid him no heed. The boy, he said, had the promise of fearlessness to him. Whether he be fearless or mortally stupid, Albinus said, remained to be seen. And yet for all the threats, in those first few weeks, Charles found his work to be simple enough, being mainly composed of the measuring, cutting and scraping of wood. Despite his antics, the freemen were amiable to him, and some had even found the whole event to be somewhat amusing. They regaled him with stories of how they had come to meet, men hired out to sea to fight a war for a king they’d never seen. Albinus himself had served as deckhand on a royalist ship, but found himself and his men abandoned when their ship had veered off course. His Captain had been the first to abandon them when he chose to jump into the sea rather than face a slow and grueling death at the mercy of the Atlantic sun.

When the war to Cromwell was lost and the heir to the throne had cowered away to France, the men no longer had a country to return to. It was here when they decided that they did not wish to return even if they could, for what use was there in belonging to a country whose people would just as soon turn their backs on you at the behest of a fanatical lunatic? And so Albinus and several other sailors decided to set off on their own, to build lands with neither King nor government to tell them what to do. Their only concern was for profit, be it from English, French, Portuguese or even Spanish coffers.

Those days became weeks, weeks became months. Six months passed in a drollery of falling timber during the day and scarce meals at night. The boy’s living conditions were merely a roof over their head and a hard ground beneath them. For the more enterprising lad, swatches of Spanish Moss that hung from every tree on the Island could be fashioned into blankets. These, the boys would come to learn, were usually shared with a colony of small, flea like insects that bit at the boys and sank into their skin. Despite all this, after the shock of his first beating, Charles found himself falling into a familiar sort of rhythm. The living conditions - though now infinitely hotter - were not very different from those he’d had as an orphan in England. The days he spent doing something in the lumber yard were better than haunting the cold streets and idly hoping for a singular charitable soul. The only real difference now was the punishment given to offence. The beatings received at the hands of a drunk and malnourished woman who had long passed her prime were nothing compared to the fate that waited you at the end of the whip. Still he considered himself somewhat lucky to have been spared the fate of the other boys who were made to work in the sugar cane fields.

Unfortunately, his luck had not gone unnoticed. The driver had never once stopped protesting what he saw as Charles’ special treatment, and he never let the opportunity to harass the boy slip. Charles was always last to eat, giving him the least amount of time to eat his food before the other boys were done and headed to their cabin. Yet Charles was always the first to be whipped, be it for a slights both real and imagined.

This treatment culminated on one particular day in June of 1690. Matthew had ordered Charles to the next plantation over to fetch for him some tools to be used in the transportation of merchandise. It should be noted here, as it will be of great importance later in this story, that in order for Charles to leave Albinus’ fields, he was given a documented paper. Now, most men on this Island, as were most men in the West at this time in history, were illiterate. So the paper had about it both a vaguely written explanation for the boy’s departure as well as the sigil that matched the one that had been branded upon Charles’ chest and marked something as belonging to Albinus. These papers were infinitely important, for if a boy were to be found wandering beyond his master’s lot without having these papers on his person, he could be returned to whomever responded to the brand on the boy’s person. Whoever found him and returned him would be handsomely rewarded, while the boy’s only reward came at the end of that dreaded lash. Rumours were abound of masters who grew tired of having to pay reward money for constant runaways, and deemed it more financially sound to simply kill the child and replace him than keep paying off the good Samaritans who would return the errant property.

And so it was that Charles set off, papers in hand, for the next field. He returned with the tools he had been ordered to fetch. When Matthew gazed upon them, his face went red with rage. He yelled that these were not the tools he’d asked for. Charles responded, with the surety of someone who believed justice to be on his side, that those were indeed the tools he’d been asked to retrieve. This must not have been the answer Matthew wanted. Or maybe, as Charles would come to believe, it was. By now a large crowd had been drawn by Matthew’s screaming. Seeing this only seemed to compel him to scream louder, so as to draw about him a bigger crowd. 

He ordered the boy to get on his knees and bare his back. But Charles was fueled by outrage, that he should be punished for simply doing exactly as he was told. He said nothing, but stood his ground without moving. Being the driver, Matthew always had about him the dreaded whip, just for such occasions. This he presently took out, and upon seeing that the sight of it had no particular effect on Charles, he began to roll up his sleeves. “You act tough now, don’t you boy? Do you think anyone has forgotten about what happens when you finally face the lash? How you’re quick to put up a fight, but the minute you fall you scream and beg, pleading for mercy like some little girl?”

It was this, more than the lash, which pushed Charles far over the brink. Long before Matthew could even unfurl the whip, Charles was on him. He wrestled him to the ground, feeling with no small satisfaction how the driver’s nose gave with a rewarding crunch under his fists. Without his whip, Matthew did not even bother to put up a fight. He lay there as the younger boy tore into him and cried for the other boys to get the child off him. Blood was spurting from Matthew’s nose when one of the freemen finally pulled the frantic boy away, chuckling to himself and holding Charles under his arm like a bag of sugar. Charles was not disappointed to be held incapable of escape. He was, however, outraged at having been pulled off the cruel Driver before he could do more damage. There had been satisfaction in the sight of that smug face contorted by pain and blood, and now Charles, having all the wisdom and experience of a boy of ten years of age, desperately wished to see the damage he’d begun to its bloody conclusion.

Driver and servant alike were taken before Albinus. Matthew was berated for letting a child get the better of him, much to Albinus’ delight. And Charles’ antics were waved away. Still, however, an example needed to be made, lest all the other boys realise how easy their driver was to fall.

And so, once again, Charles was taken to the wooden beam. This time he held his head high, his chin up. Though his heart twisted in his chest at seeing that terrible instrument of torture, he was very aware of all the other boys’ eyes on him. He held himself with all the regality he could muster, and indeed he did find some amount of pride in the cause for this punishment. Rather to be beaten by a man for something he had done, than to be beaten by a sniveling coward for crimes he did not commit. Matthew had deserved what he’d gotten, and this Charles took with him to the beam.

His wrists were bound and hoisted up. His shirt was torn. His back was bared. The whip was brandished. As the crime had been perpetuated against the Driver, it now fell upon the foreman to deliver the punishment. Charles could still hear Matthew’s taunts in his head and in his heart, and he tried as best he could to take each bite of the whip in silence. When the pain filled his head, he tried distracting himself by counting the blows of the lashes. And so it was that Charles developed a game of his own making. Whenever he found himself bound to that beam, he would close his eyes and count the lashes, one by one, seeing how far he could get before he could take it no more. The point of the game, the child reasoned, was to get to a higher number than the time before. When he cried out, the foreman had won. But if he could take a flogging in silence, then it was he who had won the game. 

Upon that particular day, Charles had gotten to seventeen. By the time he left the Island, Vane would be able to count to one hundred and thirty eight, these lashes received in one night and needing to be divided among three men- two separate drivers and an taskmaster. And when he finally stopped counting it was not because he cried out, but because his body had felled him into darkness before his mind could give out altogether.

Since the day he had landed on that Island, Charles had soothed his soul with constant plans of escape. Elaborate theories on how he could achieve this lulled him to sleep each night. Not one day went by where Charles did not dream about his escape, about how he could free himself of this hell. But time and time again, something about his plans, tiny details that were almost imperceptible at first, blew up and destroyed whatever hopes he’d nursed. And then he would start the circle all over again, a new idea, a new plan, a new opportunity. Hope.

There came upon the boys, one muggy fall morning, the realisation that one of them had gone missing. This was a boy by the name of Henry, one of the youngest of the boys being around nine years of age. He had already grown lanky for his age, and had about him a most peculiar fascination with the varying insects of this hellish jungle. He had collected a few, and kept them as one might a dog or a cat, and it was his habit to wake up earlier than the other boys so that he could scavenge food for his strange friends. So it was not unusual for the boys to wake up to find him gone, yet the hours grew on and still the boy did not return, his small insects chirping in vain for their master. When the morning’s scant food was served to the children, being usually an offering of the varying fruits born on the Island - of which few even have names in English but which natives would recognize by such names as Pitanga and Graviola – it became apparent to the driver and taskmaster that one of the children had successfully managed to escape.

There was a great stir that day, and from the cane fields to the lumber yards, no child could hold back his enthusiasm for his brother’s escape. Many stories and theories as to how he had accomplished this came about, and far more stories speculated on his whereabouts. 

And so it was that word of the escape soon reached Albinus. As always, the master remained inscrutable, showing no outward signs of agitation nor concern. Most of the boys took this to be a good sign, that he had resigned himself to the loss of one boy, but Charles knew better.

Upon every farm, plantation and field, there is usually kept a herd of dogs. These are usually fearsome, terrible creatures, bred for the sole purpose of hunting. Albinus’ dogs were particularly renowned for their viciousness.

At night, Albinus took the hounds out to a tree and there he bound them. He then asked that Henry’s, though he did not bother to refer to him by his Christian name, clothes be brought to him. A shirt was brought to him, and this he wrapped around a slab of tough donkey meat from the freemen’s own reserves. This he took and placed within a few mere inches of the dogs, close enough that they could smell it, but out of the reach of the rope that bound them.

For three days and three nights, Albinus left the dogs tied to that tree. The meat he ordered be changed whenever it started to become foul, and to be always placed within the boy’s shirt and just out of the reach of the dogs. The dogs were given water to keep them safe from dehydration, but for three days and three nights they went without food. All they had was the raw meat wrapped in that little shirt.

On the fourth day, Albinus took the meat away, and released the hounds.

It wasn’t hours before the foreman returned with Henry, or at least what was left of him. The hound’s teeth had cut at him and shredded at him, finding bone. Still Henry’s raspy breaths could be heard as he clung for life. For two days the boys listened as Henry fought for his life, until he was finally released from his suffering and sank away.

Another week went by where Charles found sleep eluding him. He was kept up by the desperate cries of Henry’s insects as they waited for their master. When he opened their small makeshift box they refused to leave, insisting on waiting. After two weeks without food, the animals soon stopped crying.

Henry’s fate was more beneficial to Albinus than any work the child could offer, for his gruesome fate had shown to Charles and the other boys the steep price of a failed escape.

For two years, Charles still on occasion found himself dreaming of his escape. But now a ghost haunted his dreams, a little boy mauled by dogs and left to die slowly while his pets cried out for him. Whatever plans Charles would dream of in the waking moments before sleep would die in nightmares involving howling hounds and dying insects.

1692 

One day, Charles was sent to aid a freeman in scouting out a promising lot of mangroves deep within the Island, where the river there congealed into a swamp. Mosquitoes had become a regular part of life for Charles, but even he was taken aback at the sheer concentration of them near this fetid water. As he was nearing his thirteenth year, he was finding that the mosquitoes of the camp were growing less interested in him than they’d been when first he appeared. The mosquitoes of the swamp, however, did not share their cousin’s preference, and bit at him mercilessly. 

The next day, Charles began to experience the first symptoms of an illness. As he worked at the lumber yard, he often found himself feeling extremely cold or extremely hot, shivering as a man in a blizzard or sweating until his body could no longer produce the water. Thinking became increasingly difficult, and the world seemed to swim about him with each turn of his head. Though his body shook with hunger, the very thought of food would cause him to vomit. Still, he was compelled to keep working, being told that the physical exertion would have him feeling better. When this did not prove true and Charles began to fall behind the other men, the driver’s lash was all too eager to offer him incentive to push through his pain.

This kept up for a span of four days, until the morning came that Charles found himself wholly unable to get up off the floor with the ring of the bell.

Ajax was called to attend to the miscreant boy. When Charles recounted to him of his symptoms, and their onset shortly following a trip to a mosquito filled swamp, he did not find himself dragged to the pillar as he’d expected. Instead, a grave look came about Ajax’s face, and he promptly excused himself. This bizarre reaction coupled with the pain in his body convinced Charles that he must be inevitably dying.

He did not know for how long he slept, and he did not recall having been moved, but when Charles woke he found himself in a new cabin. It was still as badly put together as his own, but here there were shelves against the wall with a meager scattering of books. Maps of all kinds, of every ocean and every country in the New World, had been raised against the walls. When Ajax saw that the boy had come to he explained that Charles had been moved into his cabin, where he might prove of some use until he recovered.  
Ajax brought to Charles a tea with a foul, bitter taste. Ajax laughed at Charles’ face and explained to him that that was tea made from the wood of the Chichona, and it was presently the only thing keeping him alive. 

As Charles was deemed to work in either the lumber yards or the fields, it had been decided that he would help the foreman with the more mundane tasks of enterprise. The keeping of the books, the scheduling of shipments and deliveries, and the managing of accounts. Charles already felt a sinking feeling in his chest and explained to Ajax that he did not know how to read. Ajax brushed this off, for his condition was such that he had plenty of time to learn to read before he came anywhere close to recovery.

In the next couple of weeks, Ajax plunged Charles into the business of learning to read through sheer necessity. Ajax was a man of the seas and had no patience for reciting the ABC’s, and would instead engage Charles in a sort of game of recognition, until the time came about that Charles could put letters together in order to recognize the words they formed. Soon, he was learning to write words of his own. Nothing more elaborate than that was needed to aid Ajax in the keeping of the ledgers, but still, Charles now found himself enthralled with this new skill. Ajax’s library- though it could hardly be called such a thing- was a scant collection of books on seafaring and geography. When the day’s work was done, Charles would eat as fast as he could so that he might look through those few books he had at his disposal. 

Curiously enough, Ajax did not seem to mind this. And as the weeks wore on and Charles began to recover, he came to see that it was because the foreman was, at his core, a fundamentally lonely man. When the war was over, he found himself at a loss, and had merely followed Albinus as a shell caught on a powerful current. Charles’ enthusiasm for reading and his piqued curiosity for the sea and world beyond had served as a welcome distraction, and had given Ajax the opportunity to relive his days at sea.

Little did he know, then, that it was he who had sparked something in Charles that Charles had long thought dead. In those books with their engravings of the open seas and the world beyond, so much as of yet unexplored, he found his old resolve to run away and make his freedom. Where once he sought to run simply to get away, he now dreamed of having something to run towards, the world beyond the sea.

After two months in Ajax’s cabin, Charles returned to the fields with a renewed vigour and dreams of escape.

His first opportunity came by way of a cart of lumber. Now having had access to the ledgers and being able to read, Charles knew it was to leave before sunrise and head for a merchant vessel bound for Cuba. He waited until the other children were asleep, and snuck inside the cart.

In the early hours of the morning, long before the bell, the cart was off. Charles’ plan was working. He waited until the cart had stopped moving and felt the rumble of the men leaving. He peaked from under the taught tarp and saw that they had, indeed, reached the docks. Charles waited until the men were out of sight and gingerly climbed down from the cart. The ship was neither particularly big nor impressive, more of a looming blue mass in the hazy pre-dawn light. The gangplank stretched before him, unguarded. 

“You!” A voice called out in the darkness, “What are you doing there?” A cold chill ran down Charles’ spine. He turned then and found the two drivers staring at him.

“I am to board this ship, sir. I’m—“ and here his mind reeled through every piece of information he’d drank up on that particular ship, “—I’m cabin boy to Captain Vasquez.”

The two men didn’t look convinced and began to near him. “An English cabin boy to a Spanish ship?”

Charles began stepping backwards, “He is in need of a translator.”

“Strange,” one of the men sneered, “His English seemed perfectly suitable when last I spoke to him.”

They kept stalking forwards and Charles kept stepping back, until his heel hit the air. He’d run out of dock. Charles swallowed then, and rushed past the two men. A heavy hand fell on his shoulder, another hand ripping the shirt from his and exposing his back. The boy’s back was criss crossed with the signature of a flogger’s lash, but that proved nothing beyond an overly enthusiastic boatswain or tyrannical captain. 

Here there was a pause. “Well, he’s no slave. He’s not branded.”

The other man still didn’t seem so convinced. “Alright boy, where did you really—“ Here he spun the boy around so as to look at his face. The man then cried out in triumph, “Aha! Not branded, eh? Look at the boy’s heart!” He thumped his finger against that most cursed mark.

Here the two men howled with laughter. “Never saw one there before!”

“What did you do? Piss on your master’s shoes?”

The men laughed all the harder. “Not every day you come across one of Albinus’ trying to escape. You’re going to be wishing he were the kind to merely kill you, boy.”

And so it was that Charles was dragged back to his infernal captivity. He knew that this was beyond a mere flogging, and horrible images of Albinus’ dogs flashed behind Charles’ eyes.

When he was returned and the men duly paid, Charles was not, as he’d expected, fed to the dogs. For the first time since his arrival, Charles was made to endure punishment by being taken to the stocks. With his head and hands there bound, he was flogged. Matthew was only too overjoyed at the opportunity presented to him, and this time Charles found himself counting to eighty nine. As further punishment, and to serve as a warning to the other boys, he was left in the stocks for the span of a day without being given a drop of water. This may seem lenient until one takes into consideration the effects of dehydration upon the body and mind.

The sun as it nears that line we call the equator grows more and more vicious. Upon the stock as on those horrible days on the decks of Captain Abaddon’s ship, the ground and wood grew scorching. At first, Charles became drenched in perspiration. But it was when the perspiration ceased that he truly began to feel the viciousness of his punishment, a rolling sickness in his stomach and nagging pain in his head. A grove of trees was just beyond him, and the stocks were so positioned that he had to endure the blazing heat of the day while staring at the inviting and cool shadows that lay so far out of his reach. As Albinus tempted his starving dogs with meat, so now was Charles tortured by being bound beneath the sun while refuge lay just feet away. He could hear a running stream of water as he grew more and more parched. So too did the discomfort of his position cause his body to ache further. His body swelled with the dehydration and soon the wood was biting into his neck and wrists. And so he spent his day, so that by the time he was freed, Charles was little more than a barely conscious carcass.

The next day, Charles was given no time for recovery. His final penance for having made a bid for his freedom was to be stripped of the privilege of getting to work in the lumber yard. Albinus had made a gamble on him and he had proven to be no different from any other field hand. And so it was that Charles found himself exiled to the labours of the cane fields.

1694

For two years he toiled out on those fields along with the other boys, most of whom were now becoming young men. Charles Vane was now fourteen years of age, and his life now revolved around that wretched crop, the sugar cane. His life was a monotony of ploughing the beds for the seeds, planting in January, planting in February, planting in March and planting in April. And when the planting of a field was done, the cultivation of another field begun after the requisite three years had passed for the crop to become ripe for picking, grabbing at the plant and hacking at it with their machete. The men were in the fields before the sun was fully in the sky, and rarely were they allowed out before the moon had reached its zenith.

Every year it was the same. The ploughing, the planting, the harvesting, the pulling and burning of stalks. And yet no matter how much time passed, Charles still held on to his hopes of escape. His next opportunity would come by way of an errand. 

As his last escape attempt had been two years gone, and Ajax had seen to it that now Charles was the only one among the workers who had about him the capacity to read and write, Albinus had little choice but to give Charles the due papers to let him run an errand to a nearby plantation. And so it was that chance gave to Charles his second opportunity to escape. 

Charles followed the cart drawn path through the Island, and took it as a good sign that no patrolmen had as of yet come across his way. He paid the due visit to the plantation, and got the papers from that man that stated that he was given a pass to go between that plantation and Albinus’ fields. 

The beach and docks couldn’t have been further than five miles away, and so Charles set about making his way as quickly as he could. But so it was that it was on his way to the docks when a gaggle of patrolmen should happen upon the most unfortunate boy. Being that they had caught him on the way to the beach, the papers he had on his person would be useless. He told them he was no slave, but an errand boy, sent inland to deliver a message for his captain.

One of the patrolmen, a stout, port bellied man with a yellowing face and bloodshot eyes looked at him from behind a curtain of wirey white brows. He demanded the boy turn around. Charles obliged. The man demanded that the boy lift up his shirt and show him his back. This, too, Charles obliged. Once more, though the scars upon his back were made visible, that was all there was to be seen. 

These patrolmen, however, seemed satisfied with this, if disappointed at the lack of a reward. The patrolmen bid the boy good day and he did likewise. The patrolmen began to head south, the boy began to head north. 

It was pure misfortune, then, that one of the patrolmen should remember he had business at the docks and a message he wished delivered. He reached for the boy’s shoulder, but missed from atop his horse, grabbing instead a fistful of the boy’s rough shirt. The flimsy fabric tore and the boy turned, startled. And there, over his heart, was the brand. 

Charles was taken to the wooden pillar and there tied. There was no sign yet of Matthew, and vaguely Charles wondered how far he would get up to this time. His best so far was one hundred lashes that had been divided between Ajax and Matthew. Vaguely he wondered if he could make it to one hundred and ten.

This time, however, it was not Matthew who came to him with the lash. Nor was it Ajax.

A dull, terrible fear worked its way up Charles’ spine and he had to fight not to try to back away, not to cower. Every fibre of his being yelled at him to hide, to run, to scream, to do something.

That day, it was Albinus himself who came at him with the lash. Fury such as none that Charles had ever seen blazed in those unnatural eyes, and Albinus roared that Charles should be taken down from the pillar. Here he ordered four stakes be driven into the ground, and to these he had Charles’ wrists and ankles bound. The boy was stripped, the lash flourished. From here on out I dare not describe to you what I have already endeavored to describe so many times in this most heinous place. It was the first time anyone on that Island save for Albinus’ old crewmen had seen the man take it upon himself to deliver a flogging on his own accord. And it was for good reason, for many who looked upon the scene thought for sure that the boy would die. 

Every time it seemed that Albinus would grow tired, he instead found some more of that hellish energy and kept at his wicked duty. Every time Charles could no longer hold on to that shred of consciousness, Albinus would demand that cold saltwater be poured on the boy, as he would not show him the mercy of unconsciousness.

The sun was setting by the time Albinus was finished, breathless and panting. Charles sagged in his bindings, listless as though it were his soul that had died in his breast. The lash hung heavy and wet with blood and made about it a most horrific sound. Albinus did not seem to mind the splatters of blood on his face and shirt, nor did he mind the blood he took upon his hand as he furled the lash.

“I told you once, child,” He spat, “You belong to me. No matter how hard you try to run or how far you get, you are nothing more than a dog that wandered from its master.”

And so he left. The other slaves who took pity on the boy waited until after the sun had set. They were able to free him of his bindings, but the extent of his wounds were far too great for him to be moved.

Charles lay there on the ground, in a pool of his own blood. He could no longer feel anything. He felt as though he were hovering between this world and the next. In the ship, he had begged for death. Lying there in the dirt at night, he wished only that he may live, so that he might escape and one day return. And on that day, he would see Albinus’ blood wash those accursed fields.

For seven days and seven nights, Charles lay helpless in the cabin. He could do little else, for the searing wounds in his back had manifested into beds of blisters, and the slightest pull of his muscles – the slightest hint of movement – plunged his body into a pit of agony, a burning pain as though he were being eaten alive by fire.

In those seven days and seven nights, it was his thoughts for escape and his dreams of revenge that kept him sane. He decided that every escape attempt he had made thus far had been at the feet of providence – he had left it up to chance and fortune to dictate his fate for him. No more. Luck had thus far done nothing for him. He would create his own fate.

He could hear crickets and small insects crying in the night.

When Charles was well enough to walk, he asked that he be given charge over the dogs. This seemed fitting, as it was usually a punitive measure, being that taking care of the dogs usually meant one had to stay up later than the others. The dogs Albinus kept were of a strange make, something that you or I may vaguely recognise as an Irish Wolfhound. These were descendants of the dogs that Albinus’ own Captain had once kept, and they were bred in particular for their ruthlessness and power.

It was when he was alone at night with no one to witness, when he stared at those cruel dark eyes, that Charles took it upon himself to ply the very lash that had been his own undoing. Day after day, week after week, Charles never once missed the opportunity to subdue the dogs in violence and blood, so that they came to cower at the very sound of his voice. When asked about the blood, Charles would say that the dogs were growing bored, and had taken to attacking each other.

One particular night, he stayed longer with the dogs than was altogether necessary. He waited long into the night, when it seemed that all had grown still, and began to make his way into the forest.

Some would say it was unlucky that Matthew should have been out on patrol that night. Charles, however, wasn’t particularly disturbed. 

Matthew sneered and gloated, and talked about how this time there was no way Albinus was going to let Charles live. The minute he sounded the alarm, the entire camp would be on him, to watch him die at his master’s hands.

Charles didn’t give him the time. Before Matthew was even done gloating, Charles had sprinted towards him. As he had once before, he took Matthew down with ease. But this time, he didn’t give Matthew the time to scream. Blow after blow after blow he descended on the driver’s face until it was swollen and bloody. Matthew’s eyes swivelled in their sockets to look up at Charles in horror, but there he found no particular rage, no sign of a man being driven insane with bloodlust. Charles, on the opposite, looked entirely calm. And still he maintained that cool exterior, even as he took his driver’s head in his hands and pounded it against the rocky floor. Once, twice, three times—and here he felt something give inside the head he held, like the skin of a coconut being cracked.

Matthew’s body seized, his back arching, his hands and fingers becoming clawed. Charles dropped the driver’s head onto the ground. Matthew’s eyes had gone mad—one looked at Charles, but the other had sunk down so that it looked as though it were gazing at his cheek. The driver wheezed and gasped and clutched at the air next to Charles’ head. Charles got up and got off the boy. He watched him struggle and gasp, twist and turn with wordless and choked sounds.

He left him like that, then. Whether the driver lived or not he never cared to find out. 

Even in the pit of the night, it wasn’t unusual for patrolmen to still be wandering the island. The moon was full, and Charles found himself into the dense thicket of the swamps. Here he followed the reflection of the moon where it hit the stream of stagnant water. He followed its muddy banks as it wandered around the Island before making its way to the ocean.

Hours passed until Charles became so attuned to the silence of the swamps that no disturbance went unnoticed. So when it was that there was a clamour of men, Charles knew his escape had been noted. Soon there was the baying and howling of those madly vicious dogs. The water was largely unmoving, and Charles was growing adept at lightfootedness. He wandered through the water now so as to leave as little tracks as possible. His eyes were so accustomed to the dark that he could make out the slitted eyes of the gators that ducked and swam away at the intruder. He could hear the hissing of the snakes around him, and was careful to give a wide berth to those gators who chose not to move out of his way.

He came to an island and there he climbed. The dogs were coming closer, but the men were still far behind. Charles stopped then, stayed still, and turned. The dogs came at him with a gallop, but stopped when they saw just who it was they were chasing. Be it the conditioning of their training, or the near demonic light that seemed to possess his eyes, even the beasts knew to stay back. The dogs tucked their tails between their legs and sunk their back down low. When Charles moved ahead, they did not follow.

No port is ever entirely clear, not even in these most unholy hours between night and day. Luckily, this was no real port, and its residents had little respect for things holy and unholy alike. This time there were no drivers to catch him, and when Charles spotted the gangplank, he wasted no time climbing aboard the ship. What kind it was, what it sold, he didn’t even bother to notice. Charles slinked in the shadows as he had in the swamp. He could make out the sleeping men, and the pungent smell of alcohol. Slipping by them was no more difficult than slipping by the alligators in the swamp. He found the cargo hold, being full of cottons and linens, and found a corner for himself there. Here he crouched down, and he waited.

He didn’t realise when he fell asleep. In all reality, he had never planned to get this far. But when he woke, he could feel the familiar rocking of a ship that was now at sea. It didn’t take long for him to be found and taken before this ship’s captain. He was a man by the name of Captain Goncalvez, a mean little man with suspicious beady eyes and knobbled hands. He asked whom the boy was, and Charles introduced himself as an orphan that had wandered off an English merchant ship and was trying to get home. 

Those two little beady eyes did not look convinced. 

Goncalvez said the boy spoke like an Englishman, but he was far too tanned for one. Charles replied that his was a seafaring family. 

The captain seemed convinced by this, but—and there was just one more thing. Just out of curiosity, before the boy left, if he could just oblige the captain. He ordered there that the boy be stripped of his shirt. When he saw the result, the small Captain burst out with a triumphant laugh. There was only one place in the New World where he’d seen little English boys turn as dark as Blackamoors, and it wasn’t on the deck of some merchant ship. 

Charles was to be locked in chains and thrown to the brig. They would not say to where the ship was headed, but it was made clear to him that the ship had business on a particular Island after their next port. 

This time, there was no sickness from the bouncing of the ship. The sounds of footsteps over his head and ringing off the wood around him were the only indicators of when day had passed to night, and night passed into day.

And then one day, the ship came to a decided stop. Charles could not hear the sounds of port or deck outside. And then there was a most unusual clamour, like nothing he’d ever heard before. The footsteps fell heavier, louder, in greater numbers. There were even the sounds of footsteps—and here Charles though he must be going mad, for he could swear he could hear the sounds of footsteps on the side of the ship. 

If his hearing were right, the men above decks must surely have turned into a herd of horses. 

And then there was a sound most peculiar to his ears. A popping sound. Once, as a very small boy, he’d beheld a fireworks display from across the river where he’d lived. He hadn’t been able to see the blasted things, but he could hear them. And it was, indeed, a most peculiar sound that he had never heard again. Until now. 

Another pop. And another. And another. Exactly like the sound of those fireworks.

But these pops were not accompanied by cheering. Here was a sound Charles was, however, quite familiar with. 

He could hear screaming now.

More pops, more screams. Yells, low yells coming from men, maybe ten, fifteen of them. There was a frenzy of footsteps abovedecks. More pops. 

And then there was silence. Absolute and utter silence. 

And then one single set of footsteps. 

Charles waited.

Abovedecks, Captain Avery was making survey of this his latest capture. He walked among the bodies as one might dodge litter scattered about the street. His mind at present was lost in its calculations. This silly little Portuguese frigate would be, of itself, useless, for it was far too big and awkward for giving chase. It might, however, fetch a decent price on Port Royal, but nothing near what he needed before he could set off for India. 

His men he sent belowdecks to take survey of the ship’s goods. Avery wasn’t holding his breath. The ship wasn’t big enough to hold slaves and it rode too high to carry metals or minerals from the Southern colonies. Some cotton, he figured, some silks perhaps from the Portuguese trading posts off Thailand. But not enough to pay the repairs for the Fancy.

Avery sighed and cracked his neck, the growing realisation of bullets wasted and an afternoon lost nagged at him. The sight of his Quartermaster bounding up the stairs from belowdecks cheered his mood, 

“Jennings. Good news, I trust?”

The Quartermaster's grim face was response enough. 

“Ah,” was all Avery said. “Well, I figured as much. The ship may fetch us a good price, at least. Any survivors?”

The Quartermaster tugged at a chain behind him. “We found this in the brig.”

Avery watched as a young boy, little more than skin and muscle, followed after Jennings. The child was so emaciated so that his age was difficult to discern, he could have been anywhere from nine through fifteen. His skin was tanned as a native and he had long, unkempt hair as a savage. But the eyes that stared at him then were bright, clever. He’d seen a panther once look at him with those very same eyes, as though it made little difference to the creature whether it should kill him or not. Avery came to stand over the boy.

“Well, child? Are you a halfwit, or, God forbid, Portuguese?”

The boy set his jaw firmly and raised his chin. “I am no Portuguese, and if I am a halfwit then I am a halfwit that has just survived all of your men.” 

And here Avery smile, stepping closer to the boy. He pointed to the mark upon the boy’s breast and immediately the boy stepped back as though burned. “You are an Englishman, and yet you bear a slave’s mark?”

The boy looked up to him with bright fury in his eyes, “I am no slave.”

Jennings sighed, “Should we kill him, sir?”

“Oh, heavens, and waste yet more bullets? I’ll have you know those don’t exactly grow on barnacles.” He waved his hand, “Put him among the men. There’s a boy somewhere in there his age, isn’t there? A deckhand or cabin boy or something like that? Oh, you know the one I mean! Tall and skinny like a scarecrow, can’t shut up for three seconds?”

“Rackham, sir.” 

Avery snapped his fingers, his eyes bright. “Yes, yes, him. Put him in with Rackham and his little friend. Have Rackham show him around.” Here Avery turned to the child, “Tell me boy, what name do you go by?”

“I am Vane, sir.”

“Well then,” Avery said with a flourish, “You are now Vane of the _Fancy._ I’d rather get something out of this blasted raid, so please, don’t make me kill you.”


	4. Prologue | 1694-1696 | The Pirate King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being the final account of the life of one Charles Vane, the destitute youth who found himself sold into slavery. Enclosed lies the tale of how the poor street boy began to give way to the demon butcher the world would one day come to know as Captain Vane...

Prologue Final

The Pirate King

_1694-1496_

 

And so it was that the _Fancy_ bore upon itself its newest member, the young lad whom the crew would come to know as Vane. The small ship that had boarded the Portuguese barge was not, in fact, the _Fancy_ , but rather a vassal of the much larger ship. Vane was packed upon the boarding vessel, and taken to the _Fancy_.

 

The ship loomed like a floating civilization of masts and sails. It bristled with fourty six cannons, and a crew eighty six strong, whose laughter and shouts Vane could hear even from far out at sea. The brig herself was brown of English timber and still shone new, having not yet become tarnished by years at sea. At one point, the _Fancy_ would not have stood out among any other mercantile ship. Charles had spent enough time around lumber, however, that he could easily discern where trained hands had recently taken upon themselves to transform the simple and nameless brig into the domineering warship that loomed before him.

 

If there was one peculiarity to the ship, Vane noted, it was upon the space where the ship’s name should have been written. The wood there had been gouged out and scratched, and The _Fancy_ hastily written next to it in paint. The contrast between this crude bit of carpentry stood out in a ship as fine as the one which he now boarded. So too could he not help but notice where the sails, though still having about them that peculiar smell that always seemed to hang about new canvas, were singed with ash and burned through. And here and there the polished brown wood would stop in splinters, patched up hastily with what looked to be the wood of entirely different ships.

 

Upon his arrival, Vane was taken under the tutelage of a boy of similar age as had been the Captain’s instructions. When Vane first beheld the strange, gangly creature, he thought the Captain’s observations of the boy’s uncanny resemblance to a scarecrow to be rather astute; for her was tall and skinny, looking to be made up of a mess of long limbs with very little torso between them, and he had a shock of unruly dark hair atop a head that seemed all the larger as it perched upon a long and skinny neck. This boy was known as Rackham, but, excited to have another boy of his age on crew, he eagerly introduced himself to Vane as Jack.

 

Now this behavior was extremely peculiar to Vane, for under Albinus’ care, any act of friendship or kindness between the boys was usually followed by a treachery of some sort. If Vane was cautious, however, then Jack took his silence as nothing but a trifling challenge. Vane soon became convinced that Jack Rackham, having failed to win himself a friend, was now intent on talking him to death. Jack talked as Vane was introduced to the lines. Jack talked as Vane become acquainted with the entirety of the ship. Jack talked while Vane was given his duties.

 

Morning, noon, and night, the boy could talk without so much as even pausing for breath. If Vane didn’t respond to him, then the boy only took this as encouragement to talk more, hellbent as he was on winning the mysterious and angry eyed boy over to some end that Vane dare not even imagine. Soon, Jack’s voice became as familiar as the ship itself. The _Fancy,_ Vane quickly came to note, bore about as many similarities to the ship that had brought him from his homeland as a feral lion must bear to an aging and malnourished housecat. Upon glancing the size of the _Fancy,_ Vane had very quickly decided the ship must not be able to move very much at all, to the point that he was at a loss for how a thing of such great size should even be able to float. And yet he was too quickly proven wrong. When the ship took to sea she did sail like a siren, and steered with quicker dexterity than even the smallest fishing vessel, and this she did without once groaning in protest as his first ship had done. It were as though she became silent in concentration, or maybe even joy, for it was when she was out at sea that she did become happiest.

 

When Vane got over the shock of Jack’s keen enthusiasm, he noticed that they were never truly alone. Even as Jack showed him the bowels of the ship, the vast array of cannons and ammunition, or the best hiding spaces, there was always a third with them. Though this person you’d never notice, for they seemed to perpetually move within the shadows, almost as though they could spring up from those spaces where light did not seem to exist.

 

Upon first glance, Vane took this creature to be a child, a boy much younger than Jack and himself, for the creature was so small. Even the clothes it wore seemed to overwhelm it, and it always wore a large, floppy hat that seemed to completely obscure the child’s face. After enough time had passed, Vane would come to realise this was no small boy, but far more horrifyingly, this was, in fact, a small girl. Having come from an Island where such things did not even seem to exist, Vane had not yet learned why it was so prudent for a small girl to always be in the company of one she could trust, lest she be left alone in the company of the men above decks.

 

At first Vane was weary. The truth was he dared not make himself at ease, lest the inevitable brutality he’d witnessed upon his first seafaring voyage return and so shatter any trust he might be foolish enough to indulge in. Though the food aboard this ship wasn’t exactly much of an improvement over that of his first voyage, he did not eat alone and in seclusion, rather he was taken to eat among the rest of the crew (this he did not do entirely eagerly, and he did indeed try his best to glare his way back into the solitude that was most familiar to him, but he quickly found this tactic was to no avail.) These were not sickly men, or dying men, or captive men. Rather they were energetic and enthusiastic, and were quick to joke around with the queer eyed lad the Captain had found locked in irons on some Greenhorn ship. The boy’s perpetual silence became a great source of amusement to the men, who each deigned it upon himself to break the lad of his silence.

 

It was on these meals, with the men joking and laughing, drinking and singing, that Vane came to know the story of the ship upon which he now found himself.

 

The wood on the side of the ship had been gouged out for this ship had not been born the _Fancy,_ rather it has been born as the _HMS Charles II._ It was a mercantile ship that had been commissioned by a man by the name of Sir James Houblon, being either some nobleman or some rich man who deemed himself noble and bought himself a fine title of _Sir,_ depending on who was telling the story. The _Fancy’s_ Captain, Captain Avery, had begun his career on the _Charles II_ as a First-Mate to a Captain Charles Gibson. Under Houblon’s patronage, the ship was to go to Spain to pick up travel papers for the Caribbean. There, the men would go about making Houblon’s fortunes by way of sacking settlements and raiding ships, in exchange for a handsome semi-annual salary for the men’s troubles. Instead of treasure, however, the doomed crew of the _HMS Charles_ would find only betrayal.

 

The voyage already began inauspicious, as the planned two week trip to Spain ended up taking a full five months. And yet, despite the prolonged wait, when the ship made port at La Coruna, they were told that their travel papers had not yet arrived. Without those papers the ship could not leave the port. A month passed, and still there were no signs of the papers. Worse yet, there were no signs of the promised salary. The crew quickly grew uneasy.

 

Stuck at port, a group of men were sent out to petition Houblon, asking that the promised salary be paid to the sailors or their families. These petitioners quickly found themselves in shackles, and were promptly thrown into Houblon’s brigs.

 

When word of the ship’s perils arrived in England, the wives and families of the sailors demanded that something be done for those Englishmen trapped in some godforsaken Spanish port. To this Houblon said that the ship was now under the control of the King of Spain, and that as far as Houblon and the English crown were concerned, the Spanish King could pay the men or hang them as he so pleased.

 

The stranded ship soon discovered the dark meaning to Houblon’s cryptic words. Indeed it was that the _Charles II_ was a mercantile ship. However, the merchandise wasn’t to be found in the plunder off some Caribbean Island— the merchandise was the men themselves. With blessings from the Royal Crown, Houblon had sold the _Charles II_ and all its men into the service of the King of Spain for “all the dayes of their lives.”

 

The dark familiarity of this story, of betrayed trust and the selling of human lives, did strike something of a cord with Vane, whose back still stung in the depths of the night and the echoes of the lash still rang in his nightmares. It was Vane who finally sought out Jack, and asked to hear how it was that the crew broke free from their unwitting bondage.

 

Jack had stared at him in dumbfounded silence. In the simple task of stringing together the words that would form the question, Vane had spoken more words since he first arrived aboard. Jack was all too eager to regale him with the story.

 

While the ship was stalled in port, it was Avery who began hatching the plan for escape. Jack had been among those men he’d sent out of the ship in the dark Spanish night to search for other Englishmen who had been tricked by Houblon and the English crown and now found themselves stranded on the wretched port. They were told of a tavern where the first round of Houblon’s men, now stranded in Spain, were said to frequent. Here the men of the _Charles_ hoped to find a sympathetic ear, and aid. It was at that Tavern, Jack said with a grave air, where he first met Anne. It was the first time Vane had heard the mysterious girl’s name. If Jack’s face darkened at the recollection, Anne’s face remained, as always, inscrutable in its shadows. Vane did not press him for further detail. Jack snapped himself out of his dark reverie with an apology, and explained that the men in the tavern had been brutes, and as such had taken to the Spanish fleet with aplomb and had no interest in helping out their fellow Englishmen.

 

With the risk of having their plans be outed, Avery abandoned the idea of seeking more men. With what little he had, he placed the Captain and Second Mate under locked doors, and set the ship from the harbour. It wasn’t long before word spread, and Avery found his ship and men under the sights of the cannons from La Coruna’s ancient fortress. The battle had been vicious, and the _Fancy_ still carried those wounds upon her back, but the _Charles_ had managed to make it out to sea. Avery offered Gibson command of the ship if he should choose to join their rebellion, but Gibson refused. This Avery took with no malice, and - after the Second Mate also refused to join the rebellion - Avery let them go ashore with anyone else who refused to join his crew.

 

Avery was now captain, and the crew decided to abandon the crown just as easily as it had abandoned them. The _HMS Charles II_ became the _Fancy,_ owing no allegiance to any sovereign nation beyond itself. They would, indeed, raid settlements and ships as planned but not to the profit of Houblon. They would head for the Caribbean in order to fortify and stock the ship away from the prying eyes of Europe or the Royal Africa Company. And that, Jack concluded with a dramatic flourish of his long hands, is where Vane had come in. They’d been raiding ships in order to build up money to repair the damages the _Fancy_ had suffered, and that was how they’d come about the young, mean eyed Vane. Jack shrugged. He supposed it was something about the sight of an Englishman in foreign shackles that had captured Avery’s sympathies.

 

Vane took this information in with a hungry eagerness. He asked what were the plans of the future, though truth be told it mattered little. He’d follow this ship and its men, joined together by betrayal and abandonment, into the bowels of the sea before he risked another Albinus, though he did not tell Jack this. But Vane had now come under the embrace of fortune, and found the ship’s plans for the future to be very much agreeable. They were headed for Port Royal, were Jennings had some local connections, to try and sell their recently acquired plunder. After that they were to head for the African Coast, and finally to India, where Avery believed a King’s worth of plunder lay waiting for them in the Indian Ocean.

 

It was as the ship headed for Jamaica that Vane came under the notice of the Quartermaster, a man by the name of Henry Jennings, who, as the reader will see in future chapters, would play a large role in the creation of the Captain Vane of many myths. In working for Ajax and the keeping of the legers, Vane had developed an acute memory, and upon the completion of his first week on the _Fancy_ he could already name each and every line, sail and rope aboard the ship. Vane was also becoming remarkably familiar with the ship, and already was known to be able to deliver a message to anyone, no matter how far in the ship they were, and he was recognised as a damn fast sight among the ropes. Some of the men had come to joke that the wild boy was part ape, for no gust of wind nor roll of surf could knock him off the ropes and riggings. He had a strange sort of movement about him, a natural sense for manoeuvring, that allowed him to move quickly and efficiently as though the ship were one enormous plaything to him. Rackham, by contrast, had the habit of engaging the sailors in conversation, and could turn a simple message about which flags needed raising into an hour long diatribe on the history of nautical messaging. Still, these were but small accomplishments, just enough that Jennings could remember the boy Vane, and knew to call on him for those most pressing matters.

 

Once the Fancy reached Port Royal, Jennings and Avery set about making their sales. A meeting had been scheduled with some young upstart from Boston. Nobody really knew who the man was, save for the fact that he had recently set himself up Governor Trott’s old mansion in New Providence. He had travelled to Port Royal specifically for the occasion to meet with Avery, ostensibly to make a name for himself. This, Jennings reasoned, could only work for their benefit, for the newcomer’s success was now reliant on their success. The man, who had yet to build any formidable sort of reputation save for the one his father’s name owed him, had been known to brag that he could sell anything to anyone, no questions asked.

 

Watches were scheduled, duties assigned. And then, for the men, there was a slim period of utter freedom.

 

It was a balmy night in Port Royal, and the moon hung low and fat in the heavy starlit air. The streets of Port Royal glowed gold with candlelight, and not one door remained closed in the thoroughfares. Light and music spilled from every home and restaurant and filled the streets. The air was heavy with the smells of spring magnolias and the ocean breeze. The crew descended upon Port Royal like starving beggars upon an Oasis. It was there that, for the first time in his life, Vane was to know that most fleeting pleasure that is the possession of free time.

 

He was, in a word, utterly lost as to what to do with himself.

 

His utter confusion at not having any orders about him struck the men as being the height of hilarity. When it was revealed that the fourteen year old boy had no vast experience with drink, the men kindly and, indeed it could be said, with that peculiar brand of sensitivity unique to sailors, took it upon themselves to remedy this most atrocious lack in the boy’s education and upbringing. The fact that the young boy was eager to prove himself as capable as any other man only made the job easier.

 

And so Vane was lead into a tavern on a balmy night in Port Royal, about to engage in the hazing that would mark him as one of the pack. Even Jack was only too happy to play along, goading Vane into drinking more than he could. Jack had long figured out how Vane’s greatest weakness lay in his immense pride. So Jack concocted a scheme in which he would engage Vane in a drinking contest. He’d watch Vane wolf down a flagon from behind his glass, but Jack would only feign drinking himself. When Vane’s flagon was empty and Jack’s glass still near full, he would act utterly crushed at his failure, and beg that Vane give him another shot at besting him. The end result was such that Vane only got more and more drunk, while Jack remained sober. Well, somewhat sober, for even he had his limits.

 

Soon it was that some of the other men from the ship broke away from the fated contest, and took it upon themselves to procure a fiddle. As night wore on, the whole tavern was awash in song and music, and even men who had never spoken a word of English in their lives deigned to join in:

_“_ _No mortal sure can blame ye man,_

_Who prompted by Nature will act as he can,_

_With regard to a black joke, and belly so white._

_For he ye Platonist must gainsay,_

_that will not Human Nature obey,_

_in working a joke, as will lather like soap,_

_and the hair of her joke, will draw more than a rope,_

_she with a black joke, and belly so white._

_The first that came in was an English boy,_

_and then he began to play and toy,_

_With her black joke, and belly so white!_

_He was well vers'd in Venus's School, but_

_He went on like a Lion, yet came off like a fool_

_From her Coal black joke, and belly so white…”_

The men roared with laughter, changing the lyrics as the song went around the room. The two boys kept at their game, but soon were goaded into challenging other young cabin boys from neighbouring ships. A betting pool was hastily drawn up, with the wild looking English boy competing against the scrawny Chinese one, and a portly Dutch cabinboy quickly taking the lead.

 

The end result was that, despite his insistence that he was just fine to walk on his own, Vane had to be practically carried back to the ship by Jack who, in turn, had to practically be carried by Anne. Though many were witness to how Anne had probably drunk more than the two boys combined, she was the only one left with the capacity to walk in a straight line.

 

By the time Jack’s and Vane’s watches began, they, and most of the other men on their watch, were still swaying with alcohol and having a difficult time focusing. Jennings threatened then to have them all flogged, but Avery only laughed, and said the men had been deserving of a night of fun.

 

His good mood had reasons beyond a love for his crew. His mysterious seller from New Providence was proving as good as his word, and before sunset he had found a willing buyer for the stolen Portuguese ship, and had set about the business of procuring another buyer for the small merchant freight they’d captured off the coast of Havana. He at present promised he had promising leads for buyers for the cotton and linen, so that within two weeks time, Avery would have about him the money he needed to start his repairs.

 

1695

 

Under Avery’s watchful eye his schedule was seen to, and repairs to the ship were soon underway to transform the mercantile ship into one of the most feared Pirate Warships of its day. Shortly after Vane had joined the crew, it became apparent to Jennings that Vane was, in fact, literate, if only just so. Avery, knowing full well that Jennings was always in need of help with the records, made Vane an offer. If Vane were to forego four of his meals with the rest of the crew per week so that he may help Jennings with the Captain’s records and archives, he would be given a small stipend added to his salary along with the benefits of furthering his education. This took Vane so aback so that he was rendered speechless. Avery asked if he had committed some offense in proposing this to the boy, but Vane denied such a thing. He stopped for a moment, and, emboldened by his experiences among the men, he asked Avery why he would offer recompense when he could simply make Vane do it or beat him if he refused.

 

Though Vane had now long enjoyed the privilege of clothes that fit him and protected him from the sun and wind, Avery pointed to his heart as though he could still see that brand there. If regular beatings worked in creating loyalty, he said, you would not be here. One beats a man for insubordination, one beats a man for putting the crew’s life at risk. But, Avery said with a certain air of tragedy about him, you cannot beat loyalty into men. Men who fight because they believe in a cause are harder to kill than men who fight simply because they are told to. And Vane knew, then, he would follow that man into the jaws of hell if only he asked him to. Avery smiled as though he could see straight into the boy’s thoughts, and excused him, saying he’d give Vane the night to think the offer over. For one moment, the thought of letting down that man, the one man who had ever shown him trust and respect, seemed to Vane more terrible than an eternity spent before Albinus’ whip. Vane called out after him that he would take the job. Avery turned then, and said he was confident Vane would not regret it.

 

June came. The sky shone blue and a cloudless breeze danced through the sails when the _Fancy_ set about its most famous voyage.

 

Vane had come to suspect that life at sea aboard Avery’s ship must, inevitably, share some of the hardships that he’d experienced all those years ago. Yet there was one detail that set this ship apart from the mercantile ship he’d been trapped in, and this detail conspired to make his life seem blessed by fortune. The mercantile ship was a large Clipper, and at best carried in the total of its crew and captives about twenty heads of men and children, so that there were always jobs that needed seeing to. The _Fancy_ , by contrast, was a converted warship built for speed and maneuverability, so that, despite its massive size, its design was kept as minimal as could be managed. To add to this, it boasted a crew over eighty strong. The end result was that jobs were quickly seen to, repairs quickly made, and the men quickly found themselves idle.

 

As cabin boys, it usually fell to Vane, Jack and Anne to handle the more mundane tasks of the ship. Seeing to the filthy animals belowdecks that were kept there for meals, cutting the salted meat for the cook for that night’s dinner, and helping with whatever minor repairs were needed on the lines and sails. Still, this only accounted for half the day. Vane made the best use he could of the quartermaster’s libraries, being mostly filled with maps and logs of Captains long gone. His time grew quickly occupied, for he found himself becoming a prolific writer, for Avery detested Jennings’ scratchy hand and the Quartermaster himself had no particular love for writing. So it was that when Vane would finish fetching whatever logs were called for, he was made to take down Jennings’ dictations. And yet, after a few months at sea, even he eventually found himself at a loss for what to do.

 

At first he watched the other men to see how they spent their time. The fiddle was a common sound on the decks, but nowhere near so common as the sound of the rolling dice. It wasn’t long before Vane was taught those most precious rites to any man of the sea, the highly honoured dice and the venerable holy deck of cards. While Vane went about diligently trying to not lose his small salary as he became acquainted with the various games, he couldn’t help but notice a small anomaly in the crew’s behavior.

 

Three weeks into the journey, and about two days from the line of the Equator, the men begun behaving rather strangely. They’d ask the cook for leftovers, only to store them in large bags and leave them out in the sun where they could rot. Even as the smell became unbearable, Vane was shocked to see that neither Captain nor Quartermaster seemed to take note. When Jack volunteered to do away with the foul things, he was quickly banned from coming anywhere near it.

 

Other peculiarities occurred. Jacob, a young deckhand, had been in possession of a trunk of women’s clothing he’d captured off a ship and was hoping to sell. This he one day found mysteriously missing. When Jack was ordered to wash out the animal’s pens, he found the mops missing. And yet, nobody ever seemed to pay any of this any attention.

 

It was three weeks and two days into the trip when Jack and Vane, along with several other newer recruits, Anne among them, were woken in the middle of the night by being thrown or shaken from their cots. Everyone from the recently recruited to those who had only been to sea once or twice before was gathered on the deck, in some unholy hour of a moonless night.

 

There they found a sight so peculiar they must have thought themselves still quite asleep. The deck had been done up as a parody of some bizarre ocean themed throne room. Eight men stood gathered around a throne, four to each side. Upon these men one could account for the missing women’s clothes – this they wore on their massive and hairy bodies – as well as the missing mops, whose long tendrils had been fashioned into greasy makeshift wigs to create the illusion of long hair. It was Jack who realized that one of Neptune’s consorts was none other than Jennings himself, who was having a difficult time with his mop-made wig. These men were introduced as the court of Neptune.

 

Neptune, being the easily distinguished as one of the sailors who went by the name of Big Country, was seated upon his throne, and had been covered in sea shells and ornamentations of all kinds. He referred to the apprentice crew gathered before him as slimy pollywogs, and that as they now crossed the equator for the first time in their lives, they were to be inducted into what he referred to as the mysteries of the deep. This ceremony began when the bags of rotting food were opened and fashioned into fetid and smelly necklaces. The pollywogs were told their first challenge was to wear those necklaces for as long as the ceremony lasted. Punishment awaited failure.

 

For the next two days, the ship erupted into a riot of increasingly ridiculous challenges that sometimes bordered on the macabre. These tests were either handed down from the sorts of tests the experienced sailors had survived, or were invented in the moment as a way to test the recruit’s endurance. It ranged in things as innocent as having to wear their clothes backwards, to no longer being able to eat their meals at tables. On the first day, half the recruits gave up when the morning sun cooked the rotting meat on the necklaces they’d been given.

 

By noon the second day, only three of the recruits remained. These were the three who were quickly coming to earn the reputation on the ship as The Terrible Trio- Rackham, Vane and Bonny.

 

By midnight, only Anne and Vane had managed to outlast every challenge thrown against them. Once again, Neptune’s court was called, and the two brave sailors congratulated on their courage and endurance. All the recruits were gathered in their entirety, and congratulated on their first accomplishment at sea: They had survived their crossing into the equator, and were now inducted Shellbacks of King Neptune’s Court.

 

From that point onwards, the ship roared with laughter at night as stories were exchanged. Sailors shared stories from their initiations, their failures and accomplishments, and the newly minted Shellbacks laughed about their recently shared adventure, and congratulated the older shellbacks on their brutal creativity for mischief. Vane had not noticed when he himself had taken to joining on these conversations, on the jokes and taunts, as though he’d spent his entire life with these men.

 

It was two months after they’d set off when the _Fancy_ had to make a stop at Moia to replenish its stocks of salt and water, a most tiresome business that involved the lugging of barrels from the ship to the Island and from the Island back to the ship in the unforgiving North African sun.

 

The winds at sea grew fickle, and stopped altogether. The ship floated listlessly, and rumours were abound that food was quickly running scarce. After four days passed without the _Fancy_ making any progress towards the horn of Africa, Avery cast a vote that the _Fancy_ should change course for the African coast in order to trade and gather provisions. The vote was passed.

 

The _Fancy_ came upon a small village off the Ivory Coast where it docked. Having taken the ship’s logs and inventory to memory, Vane was given the privilege of accompanying Avery, Jennings and the Boatswain- a rotund and perpetually sleepy eyed man by the name of Jefferson – to go to the coast to make trade.

 

They did not find a Portuguese settlement, as Avery had said, but did find instead a coastal African tribe of the Adjruku people. One of the men there did, however, often conduct business with the Portuguese, and could converse with Avery in that strange language. The men looked upon the white traders with interest. The gold around their necks and shoulders, on their belts and wrists and ankles, served as testimony to a people who were indeed quite ready for trade. Though Vane could not make out a word that was said, the exchange seemed to be going amiably enough, for the men laughed and Avery smiled jovially enough.

 

Avery took a boat of the tribesmen, being seven in total, in order to let them explore the ship’s bounty.

 

When the boat returned for the rest of the crew, it was only Avery at the helm.

 

When Vane returned to the _Fancy_ , he was immediately ordered to go about the ship and let the men know the ship was about to set off at once. Vane set about his orders without question. Soon there were a torrent of cries and yells from the shore, and a hail of spears and arrows rained down on the ship, tearing the sails and snagging the ropes. But the _Fancy_ was off.

 

It was when Vane went to fetch the tools by the brig that he saw the men to whom Avery had promised trade. Their gold had been stripped from them. Where gold bracelets had hung off their wrists and ankles, there were now only rusted shackles. Where their eyes had been bright and filled with laughter, now they were bloodshot and swollen with bruises. One of the men tried to lunge for Vane, his dark eyes wide with fury. The chains rattled and yanked the man back, so his hands fell just short of Vane’s neck.

 

For the next few weeks, Vane could not shake the knowledge of those men from his mind. Jack must have noticed this, for he refused to stop pestering Vane until he revealed the source of his foul mood. When Vane finally gave in, Jack only brushed him off, saying that Vane’s own time in captivity was merely playing tricks with his mind. Vane agreed. And yet when night fell, and the men around him fell to sleep, Vane could only stay awake and think about those men in chains, and the echoes of the lash from his own past.

 

Soon Avery spotted the Portuguese Port of Porto-Novo. Here he once again made dock. The men he had captured- now being referred to as slaves- were quickly sold. The food supplies were restored. The gold that had been taken off the men fetched enough that repairs could be made to the damaged sails and ropes. When Vane asked what was to be the men’s final destination, people laughed off the strange boy’s bizarre curiosity.

 

The _Fancy_ set off again, but now Vane was finding himself increasingly distracted, and even the crew noted that the boy was quieter than usual. Avery waited until Vane had locked himself up with the logs of past voyages as he had been wont to do to discover the source of the boy’s ills. Vane would have found it easier to avoid the question had Avery brandished about him a lash, but he could not refuse a question that was addressed to him as though he were an equal.

 

“You have been acting most peculiar since our trip to Porto-Novo.”

 

And here Vane looked down at the floor. He wondered if his Captain were in possession of somesort of supernatural ability that allowed him to read into the boy’s thoughts.

 

Avery sat behind his desk, and gestured that Vane should take a seat before him. Avery did not look as one might imagine a man of his position to look; for he was a small, rather robust man, and had about him a cheery and jovial disposition that always gave him the air of a kind and favourite uncle. Few men could refuse him. Even with the burden that was weighing down on his heart, Vane complied once he took the kind and sympathetic look on his Captain’s face.

 

“You have objections to my transactions?”

 

Vane did look up, then. His voice was tight with the conflict that raged within his soul. “I thought you said that one could not beat loyalty out of men, sir. I did not realise it is alright to beat men into servitude.”

 

Avery was taken aback, for it was the first time he had seen such an outburst of insubordination from Vane. Those eyes, usually so serious, now stared at him with an alarming light.

 

“Vane…” Here Avery clasped his hands together and leaned over a map that was splayed on his desk, “I understand that your unique circumstances may have stirred up in you some emotions that are still quite raw. However, what you must understand is that your situation was, in some way, unique. If you feel obliged to see yourself upon those men, then I ask you to fight such an urge, for it is most… unnatural for a man of your station to worry himself over such things. I cannot presume to know your story, but I have heard many tales of white children who are stolen from our native land by scoundrels and made to work as field hands and slaves. Such a thing is a barbarity because it goes against nature’s, and even God’s, way of things.”

 

Here he paused, for he could see that the boy – raised in captivity and deprived of civilization as he was - could not grasp the base reality which every white man knew as truth from the day he was born. “Vane, we are civilised men, you and I, and every hand on this ship. We are the descendants of the Romans, the Greeks, of people who had the capacity for higher thinking and a sense of our place on this world. We are not like-- those men from the coast.” Avery struggled to find his words, but he felt finding the right phrasing here to be of a most dire importance. It was Avery’s honest belief that it was nothing short of barbaric that no one had educated Vane on this topic yet, and Avery now thought of himself almost as a father imparting a life lesson upon a young and naïve son. “They are so different from us that to try and view our likeness in them is to try and find the likeness of a white man in a horse or a mule. A dog may appear to love as a human child does, but that does not make it a human child, do you understand? They are not like us.”

 

Here Vane’s face hardened, though the truth was he currently found himself more torn than ever. Avery had never steered him wrong, he had in fact always strived to help him in every facet of his education. And yet something about Avery’s words stirred up emotions that Vane had not felt in what seemed like a lifetime. “You will forgive me, sir, for in my time in slavery I found that the lash made no distinction between white flesh and black flesh. Black skin tore as easily as white skin did, and bled just as red.”

 

Avery did not presently yell at Vane for his insubordination, did not demand that he leave his sight. Instead he smiled, a small, sympathetic and almost sad smile, as a father might smile at the son who realises there have been no heroes since the Greeks. “Why, Vane, I never took you for a poet. But you are young yet. We who live at sea are fortunate men, for we owe nothing to anyone. And yet this is also our burden- for no one owes us anything, either. The borders of this ship are the extent of our world, and the men within it are more our family than blood could ever bind any two people. Our allegiance is to them-- To see that they get clothes on their backs, food in their stomach and coins in their pockets. We are in no position to claim preferences by way of spoils or currency. A slave—a Black slave—“ he quickly corrected himself, “—is a commodity as is any metal or silk. We sell our commodities to make money, and with that money we buy food to feed our men and pay them so that they may feed their families. Tell me, Vane. Were you Captain, how would you go about feeding your men when you cannot afford to buy food? When they grow weak from hunger and loots of gold and silk grow scarce, would you ask them then to differentiate between the sanctity of a white man’s freedom and that of a black man’s?”

 

Vane remained silent.

 

Avery shook his head with a tired sigh, “I understand your pain, I do. But these men rely on me as they may one day rely on you. When that day comes, would you sacrifice their trust and their lives to sate your own conscience?”

 

Vane looked up, and Avery could almost see him putting his thoughts together, so great was the effort the boy was taking to not offend his Captain. “I don’t believe I shall ever carry the burden of responsibility that you now find upon your shoulders, sir, and maybe that is why I am simply not fit to see the world as you do.”

 

And here Avery laughed, so hard that he had to push away from the table, “That is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever heard in my life! Come, boy, you’re a pirate, by God’s soul! Don’t speak prose at me like some diplomat now.”

 

And laughing to himself, Avery dismissed Vane and quickly set about calling Jennings, to regale him with the boy’s latest episode of childish preciousness. Vane’s thoughts were too riotous for him to take offense. Was Avery right? Was it only arrogance that had lead to Vane’s sleepless nights? He had only been too quick to judge Avery’s actions when it was only his own welfare, and that of his brothers, that Avery had been preoccupied with!

 

And yet Vane could not shake off the image of the men in those shackles. Despite Avery’s lecture, sleep continued to elude him in the grinding of chains that were no longer there.

 

Being restocked and repaired, the _Fancy_ now resumed its journey to India. The crew were already itching to spend the plunder they did not yet have, and so agreed that the ship should head in the most direct course as possible with as few stops as it could manage.

 

When days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months and the crew did not see but one sign of civilization, the men began to grow restless. At first they spent the time as they previously had, but there comes a point where even the dice begin to lose their allure.

 

Fights began to break out among the men, growing only in their severity. The slightest gesture could be taken as grave offense, and there soon came a time where men were simply looking for an excuse to fight each other, just so that they would have something to do.

 

1696

 

At first, the men’s nerves were allayed when they finally reached the Indian Ocean. Oftentimes, atop his ropes, or having climbed onto the rigging, Vane would find himself staring at that endless expanse of serene, emerald green water, and understanding then how it was that so many men could find themselves driven mad by such beauty.

 

There came one night when Vane, in the state of dark unconsciousness, found himself suddenly being shaken awake. And then there was the sound of someone choking. Vane opened his eyes and found Jack hovering over him, someone’s hand at his throat. It was then when Vane realised it was his hand that was wrapped around Jack’s neck. Vane let go, and Jack fell to the ground in gasping breaths. When Jack finally could form words again, he whispered to Vane that Anne had found something on the deck.

 

The two boys quietly snuck past the men who had fought and brawled themselves to sleep and worked their way to the deck. There, Vane could barely make out a shadow that stood over the edge of the ship.

 

Anne did not turn to look at them. As Jack and Vane neared her, they could see a most peculiar… Well, I suppose one could call it a light, for indeed there was a light to her. Yet this light was not shining from the moon, for it was a moonless night. Nor was this light shining from the stars, for the stars did not glow that particular colour. Blue and green and purple and all hues in between.

 

Jack and Vane made their way to the edge of the ship and looked down. It was the sea. The sea itself was the source of the mysterious light! Vane looked down in stunned silence. Where the water was churned by the bow of the ship, where the ship cast waves in its wake, the water there, once moved, would erupt into a chaos of lights, so that the entire bottom of the ship was soon aglow!

 

The three children—though now they could no longer be called thus, for Jack and Vane were both now entering sixteen, and yet they were still not quite adults—stared in awe as the lights jumped and danced about the wake of the ship and caught on the spray of the foam.

It didn’t take long for Jack to go onto one of his lectures, something about some long dead Greeks and their long dead folklore that was only at present being kept alive by the rampant imagination of one Jack Rackham. Vane and Anne might as well not have heard a word he said, entranced as they were by the living Ocean beneath them.

 

It wouldn’t be the last time Vane would see such a spectacle, and the Indian Ocean did so seem like the favourite haunt of the mysterious light. He didn’t know what it was or where it came from, and he did not presume otherwise. He was merely content to remember it as one of the many mysteries of the vast Ocean, and he took it upon himself there and then that he should not die until he could bear witness to all of the Ocean’s mysteries for himself as he did that mysterious light.

 

The night was thus peaceful and calm, and it seemed like a touch of serenity had blessed the _Fancy._ It was here where Vane learned a most ancient law of sailors, for things are at their calmest and most beautiful before the turn of the storm.

 

The next day, rumours began abound. The Captain was lost, it was said. The Captain had no idea where they were going, it was said. Something needs to be done about the Captain, it was said.

 

It was just as Vane began to brace himself for war within the ship that the lookout’s voice suddenly called out loud and clear on the still Indian Ocean. The lookout had spotted a ship.

 

The vessel was called the _Ganj-Il-Sawai_.

 

Vane and Jack raced up to the deck. A throng of men that had crowded around the edge of the railings so that the boys had to duck and elbow their way past them to the edge of the ship. What they saw in he horizon shocked them to the core.

 

Neither of the boys could believe their eyes. The behemoth that loomed before them was a three masted barque that was bigger at sea than most of the crew’s native villages were on land. The men could make out at least fourty cannons by eye, which Vane knew to mean that the ship could be carrying as many as eighty cannons on board. Vane’s time spent obsessing over the accounts and logs of Captains long dead paid off, for the first thing he noticed was how low the ship sailed, a good promise of loot. He noticed too the allowances made on the ship for living quarters, and estimated somewhere between seven to nine hundred men on board, at least. This he shared with Jennings, who agreed with his assessment.

 

They could see the mass frenzy on the ship. Guns began being raised aboard the _Sawai_. Avery barked out orders and the men took to their posts. Everyone braced for impact. There was a flash of light and, indeed, there was an explosion.

 

But not towards the _Fancy._

 

Vane watched in stunned silence as the guns of the _Ganj-Il-Sawai_ fired backwards into their own ship. There was a loud bang, and then a deafening silence above the waves. And then frantic, desperate yells.

 

As men aboard the _Sawai_ tried to stop the damage, Avery ordered his canons raised. The order to fire was called out.

 

One of the cannonballs hit the main mast of the _Sawai_. There was a large cracking sound on the wind, and the men of the _Fancy_ watched as the _Sawai’s_ mast began to collapse. Rigs and ropes pulled and snapped, whipping the men about it out to sea. As one sail pulled another down, the _Sawai_ began to slow down. Avery ordered the ship to pursue.

 

Everyone aboard the _Fancy_ armed themselves for combat. It was the first time Vane had ever held a musket in battle.

 

The _Fancy_ met the _Sawai_.

 

Though a gifted natural, Vane found himself quickly tiring of the musket. That night Vane found he far preferred a more intimate route to killing, by the sword or by the dagger. He preferred to look into his opponent’s eyes so that they may know who it was that decided whether they lived or died.

 

There was no major struggle for victory. The _Sawai’s_ Captain was a nervous, terrified man. Some aboard the _Fancy_ would later say it would have been better had the ship been armed by women dressed as men rather than a Captain as inept as Captain Ibrahim. The _Fancy’s_ crew were able to slice through the _Sawai_ without much effort.

 

Soon it became apparent that the luxury barge held more than just size and men, for it also carried its weight in aristocratic passengers. These were the guests of the Grand Moghul of India, and had been on their way to a wedding.

 

When first they had boarded, Vane had confronted men armed with tulwars and muskets, each ready to kill him if it meant his own life. All that remained of them now was the stain of their blood on Vane’s face.

 

But among the passengers he found little but wide eyed civilians, armed with nothing but their pleas. A woman held her child in her lap. Though he could not understand a word she said, Vane knew the woman was begging for him spare her and her child.

 

It was in that one moment of hesitation that it happened. A man- the woman’s husband, maybe- lunged for him, a dagger drawn. He was too close for Vane to react. And then, just as the man was a mere inches from Vane, the man’s head seemed to simply explode. The woman screamed in the red spray.

 

Bewildered, Vane turned to see who had fired the shot that had saved his life. Anne stood behind him, her expression as calm and inscrutable as ever, blood spray on her cheek. Vane didn’t hesitate then.

 

With her husband’s blood pooling at her feet, the woman complied meekly when Vane shoved her aside. Within the ornate trunks of her room Vane found jewelry, gold, a fortune’s worth of amethyst and citrine. These he threw to Anne who plucked them from the air with ease. The two of them stepped over the sobbing woman, and set about the room next to hers, and then the one after that.

 

Those who were content to beg and cry and scream, he left alone. Those who fought back were not so lucky, and Vane did not discriminate between the sexes of his victims.

 

But the plunder of the _Ganj-Il-Sawai_ had just begun. In just a few hours, Vane would find himself wondering if he would have been merciful to simply give them all a dignified death.

 

The Terrible Trio met upon the deck, when each of them was bloodstained and exhausted, and burdened by the sheer volume of gold they carried. They were about the business of spreading their loot before them and taking stock of their various prizes, comparing each and sharing stories, but soon the deck began to crowd. The men of the _Fancy_ were gathering, but they were not alone.

 

Something seemed to shift in the air. A look came about Anne’s face, more bloodthirsty than when Vane had just seen her torture a man for the location of his valuables. One hand was on her musket, the other on a sword. Rackham, too, had suddenly become strange, and he seemed to place himself between Anne and the crew. Vane looked around for any hint of what it was that he was missing. The men were dragging women and young men with them, some of their captives were kicking and screaming, others with a distant and blank expression on their face.

 

Avery and Jennings came before the men and congratulated them on their successful raid. The men roared with cheer. By the time they left this ship, Avery said, each man would leave richer than he could imagine. Already the stocks of gold were far surpassing any calculations he’d imagined. Avery said he believed it would take a total of three days for him and Jennings to make final inventory of the Sawai, and for those three days the men were free to stay aboard if they so wished and take their reward as they so pleased.

 

Without looking away from the crew, Jack asked if Vane wanted to leave the deck and look through the ship for any treasure that may have gotten left behind. Vane had a strong suspicion Jack was not thinking about loot at that very moment. Vane agreed, and he could not help but notice how Jack always seemed to keep Anne hidden in his tall shadow, and how Anne’s hands never left her musket. Each scream from a woman seemed to make the already pale girl grow all the more ghostly until Vane felt sure that she would disappear altogether.

 

They were well bellow decks, deep into the hull, when the real screaming started so that they could hear it even through the decks of wood and in the recesses of the hell.

 

There they stayed for three days and three nights. They didn’t move. They didn’t talk. Jack and Vane would take turns scrounging for food and bringing it back. Anne sat there and looked like the consummate image of utter and absolute rage. She never made a sound.

 

Once or twice, Vane would grow restless and bored and would take it upon himself to search through the ship for something to steal, something to fight, something to kill, anything. But those men he found were hardly any sport—their only means of survival had been to cower and hide and they were only too eager to die easily, so that killing them held no challenge, and far less sport. The other thing he’d find were the women. He’d never forget the terror on their faces when they realised he had spotted them. These he did not kill, and he’d always wonder if he had been the bigger monster for it. He could read the desperation in their eyes easily enough, the silent plea for him not to tell the other men he’d found something. This he obliged, but he thought it futile enough. Eventually someone else would find them.

 

Vane quickly realised that there was no sport left on the _Sawai_ for one who had no interest in the taking of a person, and so he returned to spend the duration of the stay with Jack and Anne. And there, when the screams rang out through the night, he’d find himself wondering over and over again if it wouldn’t have been more merciful to kill those women.

 

Sometimes things would go quiet. Sometimes they thought it was over. And then the screaming began all over again.

 

When the silence finally took, none of the trio made a move, for they still believed that the screaming would only start again. The silence seemed to stretch forever.

 

Movement came from the entrance. Anne had her gun drawn before Jack or Vane could even blink. A rigger by the name of Servius stopped in his tracks. Anne did not lower her gun. The man roared with laughter and asked them what in the hell they were doing in the hull. Nobody answered. Servius shook the strange adolescents off and told them Avery was getting ready to leave the ship.

 

Vane remembered how it was Servius who had been one of the men who most spoke of mutiny when the ship seemed to sail aimlessly. Yet now, after the attack of the _Sawai_ , he seemed as jovial as when they first left Jamaica.

 

Servius wasn’t the only one.

 

When everyone was back aboard the _Fancy,_ Vane noted how the most mutinous of fighters, men who were starting brawls once, twice, three times a day when things had gotten rough, were now completely different. Their face bore claw marks and scratches and bruises, and they reeked of alcohol and stagnant perfume, and yet their disposition was as calm and compliant as he’d ever seen it. Avery could have asked them to roll on their backs and Vane was sure they’d do it. In the three days aboard the _Sawai_ they’d gone from near mutinous riots to being the very image of contented sailors.

 

All it had taken to avert mutiny, he thought, was the opportunity to plunder. Pay the men in blood and screams and they become as pliant and docile as schoolboys.

 

Avery announced to them the sum total of their plunder: one hundred and fifty thousand pounds- and here the men gasped in awe- to be divided among the men. Avery himself announced he would pass the usual Captain’s share and take one share to each man’s. The lowest ranking cabin boy would have made one thousand pounds—the equivalent of twenty years wages aboard a merchant ship.

 

The ship roared with joy, even Jack whooped in celebration.

 

Yet Vane could not help but notice how it was Anne who never even seemed to acknowledge this. Her eyes remained as dark and haunted as when they’d hid in the hull of the fated _Ganj-Il-Sawai_.

 

The _Fancy,_ once so close to war with itself, was now in a frenzy of celebration. Song, gambling, laughter all well into the night. It was only Anne who stayed back from it all.

 

The next stop was to be Port Elizabeth.

 

There the men took to port with their pockets full of gold and their palms burning to spend it.

 

Word of the fate of the _Ganj-Il-Sawai_ had reached Port Elizabeth far before the _Fancy._

 

A recent ship from England, the _HMS Songbird,_ had made port shortly before the _Fancy_ , so that the stone streets were flooded with those men in their powdered wigs and bright coats, and their equally well clad wives.

 

Charles Vane was now sixteen years of age, and had just participated in what was to be one of the most historic plunders in the history of Piracy. He had served under the man who the world would now come to know as the Pirate King. Avery and his men were now synonymous with the carnage and destruction that had befallen the innocent victims aboard the _Sawai,_ and the ruthless massacre of every armed man aboard that most doomed ship.

 

One look at Vane now was enough to send those men in their powdered wigs and small army of bodyguards shuffling out of his way. Noble men and women alike who dared stepped out of their precious crown’s embrace would lower their eyes demurely at the very sight of him. As their expensive clothes and made up faces announced to the world who and what they were, so too did everything from his complexion to his scars, to the weapons and daggers at his belt announce to them who and what _he_ was. They dared not speak, dared not whisper, when he passed by, lest they risk his wrath and suffer the same fate as all those people aboard the _Sawai_.

 

And now it was that those very same elaborately dressed women who had once been so quick with their revulsion and distaste when he was but a small and shivering boy that now cowered and simpered and ducked their heads in obeisance before him. Where once they dismissed him or, worse yet, pitied him as something so far beneath them, they now scurried away from him in fear like frivolous little mice. These women could no longer will him and the men by his side to disappear. It was the rich and noble who were intruders on their world now.

 

If Vane was giving the impression of preening, then the crew took away a very different message than the one currently occupying Vane’s thoughts. When he returned to the _Fancy_ for his watch, the men were soon asking him strange questions about his age, and what he knew of women. His expression must have given them the answer they wanted for they burst out in a riot of laughter. “No wonder he was hiding in the Sawai! Lad _di’nt_ know what was happening!” One man roared. “It’s okay, we was just—we were—ah, fixin’ their backs, was all.”

 

“I know what the hell you were doing,” Vane grinned, for in his years he had grown accustomed to the sense of humour of the ship, “I’ve just never seen you do it to a woman who wasn’t crying or demanding payment.” This response earned him another round of laughter.

 

When Avery appeared, then, the men thought it must surely be to tell them to calm down. Instead, he called that the crew be gathered for a vote. The Africas had little opportunity for men like them, for they were currently under the keen watch of the Royal Africa Company. What happened, he asked, when the men should grow bored of Port Elizabeth? The men seemed to stop to think about this, and Vane knew that was precisely what Avery had intended.

 

When the men seemed most at their loss, Avery asked them where it was that they could be among more of their kind, their kindred Englishmen, while also being free of the yoke of English oppression? Where it was that they could meet more men of their trade, not hiding in a tavern, but out in the open as the freemen they were? Since they had bested the Spanish fleet and their canons- and hear the men roared in cheer- where had the men had the most fun? Here some of the men finally yelled out _Port Royal!_ Or _Let us go back to Port Royal!_

Avery smiled and settled the crowd. They had made their reputation, they had taken their bounty. Now it was time to spend it, free of fear and free of oppression. Avery asked the men if they would indulge him in a vote to return to the Caribbean— But not Port Royal. The men were taken aback! What was wrong with Port Royal? And Avery laughed. Port Royal? Where the taverns would be full and they would have to wait their turn for exhausted whores in brothels? And here the men did begin to mutter in agreement.

 

Let us return, indeed, to the Caribbean, Avery said. And here he stopped as though he were lost in thought. And what of New Providence? He seemed to wonder aloud. He shrugged, Its Dutch governor lay long dead and it had no alliances— not Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French or English. It was free, untouched land, free of laws and under the pocket of a man who had offered them help when no one knew who Captain Avery or his men were. It had been good enough for the likes of Captain Hornigold, and where every tourist and visiting diplomat headed for Port Royal, Nassau remained untouched. Its streets were not crowded, its stores and taverns open to all with gold in their pockets, and there was a bed and waiting woman for every man. Here the men cheered, _for New Providence!_ _For Nassau!_ Avery joined in the cheer. Now let them return with their plunder, not as beggars in Port Royal, but as the Pirate Kings of Nassau!

 

The speech had the effect Avery had hoped for. The proposition was cast. The votes were made.

 

It was unanimous. Captain Avery and the men of the _Fancy_ were to head for Nassau.

 

But there was one among his crew to whom Captain Avery’s words fell short.

 

Vane could not help but feel a strange sense of apprehension. For he had come such a long way since last he left the hellish outskirts of the Caribbean Islands, and he had been quite glad to think he’d never have to look upon that wretched outpost again. What, thought he, should await him there now?


	5. Chapter 1 : Undine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Hornigold knew well that Nassau was no England yet to survive the wills and tempers of an ambitious Queen."

CHAPTER ONE

UNDINE

_March 30, 1696_

 

It was a hot, balmy spring morning in Nassau and the sun shone angry behind the shuttered windows of a bedroom. The air here was thick with the scent of cheap perfume and the sounds of strange groans. A man held himself over a bed, the muscles of his sun tanned arms straining against the weight of his body. The man was half naked and panting as though he were a dockhand lifting a weight onto a ship rather than just holding himself up over a bed. He moved strangely, back and forth, and looked quite pained to be doing so. Beneath him there lay a woman, writhing and moaning, and though she too looked to be in great pain, she moaned and begged for the man to give her more and told her how good he made her feel.

 

Beyond the cheap silk veils and smokes of perfume and incense, a sliver of light cut through from a gap in the door. Here, two pairs of eyes watched this most absurd display with giggling curiosity.

 

On the other side of the wall were two small figures pressed against the door. One figure wore a dress that would have been lavish were it not now seven years out of date, and were its seams not straining against a figure that had long ago grown too tall for its size. The other figure wore a dress more modest in nature, but whose attention to detail and decor showed a burgeoning gift and eye trained for beauty.

 

There was a great commotion from the bedroom; the cries grew increasing in volume, quicker. A man cried out and a woman followed suit. The girls turned from the door and giggled among themselves but were cut short when a broom just barely managed to miss them.

 

"What are you two little imps doing?" Came the familiar roar of Mrs. Mapleton, "Didn't I tell you what I'd do if I caught you two a'peekin' again?" The broom swung again.

 

The two girls spun in place. It was Max, in her humble gown and curling hair, who bowed her head obediently and responded in turn with a musical, “Sorry Mrs. Mapleton.” The other one, Mrs. Mapleton noted, wasn’t half so quaint.

Eleanor Guthrie was thirteen years of age, and had about her a most stubborn and disagreeable inclination so that most people would rather avoid the child than run the risk of confrontation. Some even thought the strange little creature was not even human. Those who claimed ancestral knowledge of the Island’s true nature said that the child’s wild ways and mysterious temper were that of some pagan creature from the water who, having no good Christian soul, existed solely to cause trouble for her own amusement. They said that strange wan child with her hair as pale as seafoam was a changeling born of the ocean, and it was horrified knowledge of this that had sent the child’s sainted mother into an early grave and her father running from the Island as quick as Menelaus with his arse on fire.

 

Mrs. Mapleton, however, saw instead a decidedly mortal child sorely in need of a good thrashing. Max, sweet, gentle Max with her clear wide eyes and hair as curly as a cherubim’s, bowed her head and lowered her lashes prettily. But if Eleanor looked the part of some biblical enchantment, having about her a halo of that peculiar ashe-blonde hair some children get right before it begins to darken to gold, that was where all comparison to the angelic and divine ceased, for the child was every bit as vindictive and devious as a little hellspawn. Eleanor looked up and to the side and made a show of pretending she hadn’t heard a word Mrs. Mapleton had said. Eleanor let her gaze wander to the ghostly empty tavern, to the empty balconies overhead in the atrium and the chairs and empty bar around her that had once been so full of life and now stood suddenly abandoned.

 

“ _Well?”_ Mrs. Mapleton growled.

 

Eleanor deigned to look at her then with those queer and bright eyes that took their colour from the sea, “I’m sorry,” she said in the innocent singsong voice of a girl who had not yet turned into a woman, “Were you saying something?”

 

Max coughed, a strangled sound as though the girl were trying not to giggle.

 

Mrs. Mapleton could hear a ringing rising in her ears, and the familiar throbbing onset of the headache she always got when made to deal with Eleanor Guthrie and the child’s attitude. Mrs. Mapleton looked to Max, “You, fetch the water for Christiane’s bath, then Angela’s dress needs mending.”

 

Eleanor scoffed, “Have they not two hands with which to mend their own fucking clothes?”

 

Mrs. Mapleton smiled, though in all reality it was more of a snarl where her lips curled back and she bore her teeth, “When Max brings in half the money that Angela does, then Angela can, as you say, mend her own fucking clothes.”

 

“What difference does it make whether a whore’s dress gets mended or not?” Eleanor snapped, “It’s been weeks since last I saw this place full! And still I see no lines at the door, no massive lines of ships at the harbour. Does she hope to rope in one of the pasty faced puritans, by any chance?”

 

Eleanor was about to say something. Mrs. Mapleton cut her off before the Guthrie child could say something that should cause Mrs. Mapleton to commit the unmeditated murder of an heiress, “As for you,” she turned to Eleanor then with barely held back rage, “Is your, ah—“And here the rage slowly seemed to fade from Mrs. Mapleton’s face as she looked about, straightening up her hair and fussing about the lip of her bodice so that her bosoms pushed up and forward like the  prow of a ship, “—Is that charming blackamoor of yours anywhere nearby, perchance?”

 

“Mr Scott?” A devillish grin bloomed across Eleanor’s face, “He’s… _indisposed_ at the moment.” Eleanor looked to Max with a conspiratory smirk, and once again both girls were giggling amongst each other as though it were a language only they could understand.

 

Mrs. Mapleton sighed, visibly disappointed. “Oh.” She pushed her bodice back up. Mrs. Mapleton could only imagine what the two girls had conspired against the poor man _this_ time. “Well, if that’s the case, then Hornigold has an errand for you. Says you’re to meet him up in the fort.” Mrs. Mapleton knew full well Mr. Scott did not approve of the old captain’s burgeoning interest in the girl, but Hornigold’s mysterious errands did a good enough job of keeping Eleanor out of Mrs. Mapleton’s hair so that she was only too happy to serve as his message carrier. And if it should bring that dashing Mr. Scott to her without Eleanor there to distract him, so much the better.

 

Eleanor did not mind leaving, for she was suspicious around Mrs. Mapleton and found the woman to be an annoying and haggard old toad. But she didn’t like leaving Max behind. Eleanor looked back over her shoulder. There was a gaggle of women on the second floor balcony, reeking of perfume and wrapped in faded silks and fraying brocades. They stared at Max in her humble little dress like a knot of aging housecats eyeing a pretty little kitten.

 

Eleanor was always hesitant to leave Max behind, for the girl was the only creature on this Island to whom the older whore’s contempt came as an utter mystery. Already she was a promising beauty, and too often Eleanor had seen how men’s eyes would divert from the whores at their arms to fall upon the graceful little maid girl, until their attention had to be physically yanked back to the woman at their company. So the whores, needing an outlet for their rage, often fell to cruelty towards the pretty little girl.

 

But she must have felt Eleanor’s gaze, for Max looked up to her friend then and shone her a happy and encouraging smile, that bright smile as though she believed Eleanor could do anything in this world. She ran to her then with that lilting grace and took Eleanor by the elbow, whispering in her ear, “Go, and don’t put up such a fuss. If I can finish my chores in time, the old bat will let me pour drinks for her until she’s too drunk to tell a maid from a whore. When she’s so pissed she passed out, I should be able to sneak over to your house and spend the night!”

 

Eleanor pulled back and the two girls smiled at each other. Mrs. Mapleton had about her something of a sixth sense when it came to mischief, and she looked over to the two girls. But Max was already heading for the wells, and Eleanor caught Mrs. Mapleton’s gaze and even dropped her a quick and mocking curtesy before dashing off. Mrs. Mapleton didn’t hear Mr. Noonan coming up behind her.

 

“Child like that needs a good thrashing, ‘s what she needs.”

 

Mrs. Mapleton didn’t bother to look at him, shaking her head and picking up the stray cups of ale the lunch crowd had left in their wake. “One good thrashing will do no good, if anything it would just make the child all the more difficult.” She hadn’t the mind to think of just how many thrashings it would take to make Eleanor Guthrie more pliable, but she was sure it was some number not used since the Greeks, some number long and dreadfully hard to pronounce.

 

“S’a shame, really,” Noonan made a hacking sound at the back of his throat, and Mrs. Mapleton hurried her efforts all the more so that she could excuse herself from the vile little man’s presence, "Girl like that would fetch us a nice price, and just you see, couple of months in and she’d get right in line, she would. Know her place and quit runnin’ about, causing trouble all’er time.”

 

Mrs. Mapleton clucked her tongue then, “Knowing her father, she’ll be fetching him a nice price here in a year or so, and he’ll have her shipped off as soon as the gold arrives.”

 

****

 

Hornigold stared from atop his fort out past the red clay streets of Nassau onto the harbour. It stood quiet, serene under the bright spring sun. Anyone who looked upon it would have no idea that this sight heralded the end for Nassau. Hornigold put down his looking-glass, but found that he could not help himself, and looked up again. Still the sleepy harbour stared back at him. The waves rolled quietly by and the gulls called out to a cloudless sky. Everything remained unchanged.

 

How cruel it seemed that all should end now. Under Hornigold’s watch and Richard Guthrie’s money, Nassau has survived despite all odds this most insipid war between England and France that had now waged for eight long years. Under the alliance, Nassau had survived the cuts in trade and supplies that the French had machinated. And when England rewarded him and his men’s loyalty to King and Crown by refusing to send any naval aid to stave off French ships from Nassau’s shore, God’s soul, he and Guthrie had seen to it that Nassau survived that too. 

 

But now Guthrie was gone, off to save himself or escape the ghost of his dead wife or whatever the fuck had gotten into the man’s bewigged head by building a fortified manor on Harbour Island. He took his money with him and left nothing behind but his manservant and pre-adolescent daughter. It hadn’t taken long after that for the sparse population of Nassau to recognise a ship that is about to sink and flee accordingly, and now there were scarce enough people- mostly his men still loyal to him after the war – to man the one fort that remained as Nassaus’ last line of defense.

 

And then three weeks ago, the French had captured the Island of Exuma. Rumours were abound that they were headed for Nassau with three warships and a crew three hundred and twenty men strong. Hornigold had done everything he could to inspire moral—shifts had been assigned so that the fort never went fully unmanned, and he himself took up permanent residence there to brace for a French attack. He sent out desperate messages to England, to Massachusetts, to Guthrie—to anyone who could spare but one single ship to help defend Nassau from imminent Invasion.

 

No responses were sent to his pleas, and no ship had come to defend Nassau’s shore.

 

And then two days ago the words he’d been dreading finally came:

 

A massive warship had made shore on Eleuthra Island. Nassau’s end stood docked just miles away, waiting.

 

Waiting.

 

It had been two days since the ship had made port, and still Hornigold heard nothing. No one could tell him where the ship had even come from. The nights were now sleepless with the ghost of the question unanswered, that question that no man dared give voice to: To whom would Nassau fall? Was it an English ship, coming to save Nassau only to install an English Governor in the old Trott Manor? Was it the Dutch, coming to retake their old claim on the Island? Was it the French? The Spanish? The Portuguese? Who had won the race to claim Nassau, and to whom would they be now chained? Would they be made to bow before some poncy Spanish King, or would they be made to fawn in the language of the Dutch before some feather-clad Princeling?

 

Hornigold felt sure that not knowing must surely drive him mad. The more he pressed for answers, the more silence he got. There was one person on this Island whom he knew could find his answers.

 

But where _was_ she?

 

He looked to the paths that lead up to the fort and saw no sign of that bumbling little girl who had made this Island into her own personal playground, and knew its every corner and crevice as well as a child knows its toys. And now there was no sign of her either! Curses! Were she his daughter Hornigold would have her paddled! Of all days for her to take her sweet time, dawdling with the whore’s apprentice or harassing her caretaker, he was sure!

 

He looked to the path again, and still there was no sign of her.

 

Hornigold sighed in impatience and looked out to the harbour again. He felt a figure come up behind him, “Jericho, if you see the Guthrie girl, tell her to come up here immediately,”

 

“I’ll let Jericho know,” Came a small, laughing and girlish voice beside him, so catching him off guard that Hornigold nearly jumped.

 

Hornigold turned, his heart hammering in his chest. Eleanor stood next to him as though she’d materialised out of thin air. “One of these days, you must tell me how you do that.”

 

Eleanor did not reply, but merely smiled, and Hornigold was vaguely reminded of old Island rumours he’d heard about the child being some cursed and bewitched sea-creature, and not for the first time did he give it actual thought, for even seasoned sailors have about them a terribly superstitious nature and swear by old tales. And surely something of the supernatural must be at stake, for how could a child of thirteen manage to sneak past a fort guarded by seasoned veterans? Whatever her mysterious methods, they were Hornigold’s last resort now.

 

"Tell me, child, what do you know of the ships that have made harbour?”

 

Blue eyes widened incredulously, and Hornigold could swear he saw the girl fade into the innocent ignorance of a child four years her junior right before his eyes, “What do you mean, Captain? What should I know of the harbour? Mr. Scott would be most terribly upset were I to go anywhere near the sea!”

 

Hornigold sighed, but he couldn’t help but smile, “Has anyone told you you make a damned bad liar?”

 

Here she pouted, “I’ve heard it said quite the opposite.”

 

“Maybe if you didn’t bat your eyelashes so, it makes you look like a madwoman with a tic.” Hornigold sighed, “Come now, girl. This is of a most grave matter, not the time for you to be fooling about.”

 

Eleanor opened her mouth to speak, but stopped. The girl was at least smart enough to sense the urgency in his voice. She took to his side and began pointing at ships in the harbour.

 

“Last week the _Hecuba_ and the _Aeneas_ made port, The _Hecuba_ needing to unload goods and the _Aeneas_ needing to stock up on medical supplies. The _Aeneas’_ took camp to the north and the _Hecuba_ to the south, though there was a brawl since Captain Henrich of the _Hecuba_ claimed the North shore to be his. The _Aeneas’_ second mate, Alverson, won the dispute when he shot through the _Hecuba’s_ Boatswain.” She looked to Hornigold and saw only that his attention had begun to drift away from her, so she went on, “The same week we lost the _Perseus,_ and the week before that the _Southern Storm_ and _The Nightingale._ They were supposed to have docked back this week to unload cargo but haven’t been spotted since.” And here she looked again to Hornigold, ready for him to lavish her with praise for her excellent memory and the keen observations. Instead Hornigold only had that grim, distant look that left her ego thoroughly chaffed at being ignored.

 

Still, he said nothing, so that it was up to her to break the silence, “ _Well?_ ” She stomped her foot like a willfull colt, and the old captain’s attention swung back to her.

 

“And what of Eleuthera?”

 

Eleanor frowned, “Eleuthera? I haven’t heard anything of Eleuthera.”

 

Hornigold’s face darkened. Now Eleanor’s own curiosity was piqued, for she prided herself greatly on the notion that nothing should happen in Nassau that she did not know about.

 

Hornigold looked to Eleanor, his expression distant. The girl knew nothing. His men knew nothing. The Islanders knew nothing. There was but one last font of information he had yet try. Hornigold looked from Eleanor back to the camps.

 

 His men could beat the information out of anyone, but Eleanor had a certain gift for weedling out truths that no beating could ever hope to reach. He’d found her there on multiple times, playing among the camps and beating the men out of their own gold at games of cards and chance. At first he had admonished the girl, but it was for nought, for the more he or Mr. Scott told the girl to beware the camps, the more she seemed to be drawn to them.

 

More peculiar yet was how the men responded to the girl. Many of them had been exiled from their homes under old crooked Cromwell and it hadn’t taken long before England fell to that sniveling pretender William III and they found themselves banned from home altogether. Hornigold supposed that these aging men who were barred from their sisters and their daughters and had granddaughters they had never met took something of an affection to the queer little girl who approached them with the ease of lifelong friends. Lucky for her that this was Nassau, sleepy and quiet little Nassau, with its petty thieves who still thought themselves wronged sailors under the king. Were this Port Royal, however, with its men who held no illusions about who and what they were, Hornigold wasn’t so sure that the girl would have been so lucky.

 

He sighed, for he knew in this matter he had little choice. Still, the idea of putting such a grave task to such small hands pricked at the sides of his mind until all he could do was tell himself over and over again that he had no choice.

 

Hornigold tilted his head to the side, indicating a small table covered with maps and books, and topped with a bowl of oranges. “Captain Heinrich is an old friend of mine. Take those to him at camp, and see if you can find out anything about the ship that has made port at Eleuthera.”

 

Eleanor nodded sagely, “I see. So And for this information, my reward should be…”

 

Hornigold rubbed his eyes, and hoped she couldn’t see him smirk, for the child did have a mouth on her. “Potentially staving off an invasion?”

 

“Hmm.” Eleanor thought about this, and didn’t look pleased, “I don’t know… Staving off an invasion does sound like a lot of work, worthy of recompense too, I should say.”

 

Hornigold laughed at the little girl’s sheer cheek, “Little thief!”

 

“Nothing comes for free,” she grinned, “even for Captains.” And she meant it, for very few things in the world held any interest for her if a reward was not promised for her efforts.

 

“But you are a miserly little wanton, you know that?”

 

And here she grinned, more proud than offended.

 

Hornigold sighed, defeated as he always was when Eleanor Guthrie was involved. “Staving off an invasion _and_ a piece of eight if you return within the next three hours, two pieces should you return within the hour.”

 

"Done!” Eleanor beamed, and here she held out her hand for Hornigold. This he took, but it was she who shook his hand with all the strength of a man thrice her size.

 

Hornigold roared with laughter, “Tell me, child, has it ever occurred to you to simply do something out of the goodness of your own heart?”

 

Eleanor tilted back her head with a proud smile and met his eyes, “Not often, for I see no use for it.”

 

“God’s fire,” he grinned, “it will be a work to tame you!”

 

“That shall not be a problem as I will not be tamed.” Eleanor hmphed, tossing her hair back.

 

“Pity the man who should take you for a wife.”

 

“I shall never marry.” She said, and she meant it, for she had the certain determination of a child who had seen just how quickly her father had bolted from her dying mother’s sickbed.

“What then?” Hornigold chuckled and leaned back against the wall of the fort, gesturing to the sea behind him, “Will you discard your pretty dresses and hack off your hair, sail the world as a man like the shipwrecked Viola? Or will you grow your hair wild and destroy any colonies that dare oppose you, the Boudicea of the New World?”

 

Eleanor thought about this for a moment, and Hornigold waited patiently for a girlish response, a happy cry of ‘Boudicea!’ almost certain from the spirited young girl. But that was not what he got. Eleanor replied with a strong childish determination: “Neither! I shall be Eleanor of Nassau, and none shall dare trifle with me!”

 

“Oh hoh! You believe the whole world should stoop to bow to you for fear of your father?”

 

“Not at all! The whole world will stoop to bow down to me for fear of _me_!” She said, as easily and simply as though she were telling him the Ocean was filled with water, and that to suggest anything otherwise was to border on stupidity.

 

“And how, exactly, will you go about making the world fear you, oh tiny Queen?”

 

“Did the world not bow in fear of the Queen Elizabeth? She was a woman, and she had no father nor husband!”

 

“Yes,” Hornigold nodded sagely, though his eyes twinkled in that way that Eleanor knew meant he was simply indulging her. But he could not help himself, and a cheeky grin crossed the aging pirate’s face, “But… did she not also have a navy at her command?”

 

Eleanor thought about this, her little face pinching in concentration, “So then I too shall have a Navy.”

 

Here he laughed again, “You would fashion an Island of thieves and outcasts into your navy, would you?”

 

Eleanor stared up at him, “Why not?” She asked with all the sincerity of a thirteen year old heart that did not know why such a notion should be outlandish.

 

Her response only made him laugh all the harder, “You would make a pirate into an officer if it so suited your purpose!”

 

Eleanor puffed up in indignation, her eyes bright as an ocean storm and her shoulders thrown back, “Was it not you who told me how it was English pirates who defeated the King’s armada of Spain?”

 

“Yes—for a Queen backed by a throne. What should back you that any decent pirate would gladly throw on the yoke of oppression and declare himself a sailor for a cause?”

 

“Gold!” She exclaimed, looking at Hornigold as though the answer were so ridiculously obvious she thought him utterly thick for not having thought of it, “If I have all the gold, then they will have to do exactly as I tell them!”

 

“By God, I can’t argue with that.” He smiled, but Hornigold did not laugh then. Eleanor had the single minded determination of a water-current. Where she found no path before her, she would carve it out for herself. Where an obstacle was placed before her, she either found a way around it or she beat at it relentlessly until the obstacle gave way under her assault. This was that key difference between Eleanor Guthrie and father, where the latter may be content merely to rule over men’s pocketbooks, the former would stop at nothing short of utter and absolute obeisance. “Off with you now,” Hornigold brushed her off, snapping himself from the dark train of thought, “the sun should set soon and I imagine it’s not too long before Mr. Scott should find his way out of whatever trap you concocted for him this time.”

 

He watched the girl go with the oranges in hand and thought back to the Queen who had snuck upon their conversation, that other Ella of a besieged Island. Indeed, she had built herself a pirate navy, finer than any armada of Spanish dukes and princes whose only exposure to the Ocean had been through dusty parchments and dry lecture halls. Oh, thought Hornigold with a chuckle, to have been alive then! What a sight it must have been! Spanish galleons sinking by the hundreds before Pirate ships one third their size, effete Spanish officers scrambling before a mess of English pirates with saltwater in their veins and the ocean at their soul, a true battle of David and Goliath waged at sea.

 

But there was more to the story that he dare not share with the little girl, with her keen ambitious eyes and hard-set face. What he had not told Eleanor was how the besotted pirate kings had bowed at their Queen’s command and clawed to get to her bed. How many ballads were written of poor Walter Raleigh - knighted _Sir_ by the Queen herself - whose sieges against the Spanish had earned him more than a title until the Queen grew bored of her pirate King and had him sent into the Tower. This part of the story he thought the young chit best not know about.

 

Beware the lioness who should know her own strength, for Hornigold knew the sea and its men well enough to know that gold was but one of those most deadly vices that ensnared any pirate’s fate. That angry looking and thin lipped child was now a gangly youth that was dancing at the edge of womanhood, and soon she would realise that there were other ways to hold on to the wills of men than gold alone. God willing, should they survive this invasion, her father would accrue enough gambling debts to see her married off before that day should come! Hornigold knew well that Nassau was no England yet to survive the wills and tempers of an ambitious Queen.

 

And still the question stood in the back of his mind, peering out at him from that picturesque harbour: When the sun rose tomorrow, would there even still be an unclaimed kingdom for her to destroy?

 

****

 

Eleanor walked from the terrace down into the small, damp corridors of the old stone fort. Here the air hung heavy, and the dust danced where the sun could break through the stone in small slivers of light. Eleanor looked to the left, and found no one that could see her. Eleanor looked to the right and there, too, she saw no one that could see her. She walked then to the wall, to places where she, and only she, knew the stone would give way, and behind the walls there lurked other dark corridors she, and only she, knew about.

 

Eleanor made her way down through the serpentine caves she knew that wound their way up and down the fort. She knew which caves lead to other caves, which caves lead to cells, which caves led to the sea, which caves lead to grottoes and, most important of all, which caves lead out. This was among her favourite spots on the Island, being near sacred to her for it was something she liked to believe was entirely her own. No one, not Mr. Scott, not even Max, knew about these caves like Eleanor did.

 

Here, deep beneath the earth, it was pitch black. But soon Eleanor’s eyes accustomed to the darkness, her ears attuned to the walls around her until she could hear the distant moving of water, and she relaxed as one does when one knows they are exactly where they should be. It was here in the utter darkness when Eleanor felt herself most at free, for here she could allow her instincts to take over and her mind to wander freely. She scoured her head through every detail of every ship in the harbour, anything she might have missed that may have had a connection to Eleuthera that had so ensnared old Hornigold.

 

One day, long after her mother had died and the money had grown too scarse for her tutors to stay on this Island they called ‘utterly desolate’, Eleanor had found that she had plenty of time on her hands and little to do with it. This fact was made all the worse for Eleanor had that terrible propensity towards boredom that single children often develop. So she took it upon herself to make her own entertainment, and made a game of trying to memorise the ships in the harbour and the men at the tavern. She would look at a ship, say, the _Hecuba_ , and she would obsess over that ship just so until she had memorised everything about it using all sorts of games and riddles only she could understand. The _Hecuba_ , for instance, she remembered by the device of _How They Like Their Spices_ , for her captain was Captain Heinrich, it’s first mate was Mr. Thomas, it’s second mate was Mr. Leonard, its Boatswain was Mr. Theophilius and they stocked Spices from the East. Or the _Aeneas_ she remembered for it had a most peculiar crab decoration on its bow and its Captain had a tendency to shift side to side with every step, so that he came to look like a crab.

 

And so it was that there, in the dark recesses of the caves, or at night when she was trying to sleep, or during lazy afternoons when Mr. Scott had yet to track her down, Eleanor would think back to her beloved harbour and make up all sorts of limericks and puzzles and run them through her head, over and over again, until she could name off every detail about any ship or its crew and cargo that had ever landed on her Island. This information she would use to win bets with the men in the tavern who would ask her all sorts of questions about their ship and crew, and they would gladly clear out their pockets when she lay out her money on the table and dared them to ask her any question about their ship. Once she had even tricked one sailor into believing she was a great sea sorceress after she had answered his every question about his ship and his rival ship correctly and claimed, through some silly notion that seemed funny at the time, that it was the sea itself that had given her the answers. The man had been horrified and practically gave her every ounce of gold he had on him for fear that she might curse him. Though truth be told that at the prospect of gold, Eleanor had not dissuaded his fears one tic.

 

As she had gotten better and better at memorising the officers of a ship, she had taken it upon herself to see if she could memorise a ship’s entire crew. This she enjoyed most of all, for it involved her most favourite part of the Island: The Camps. She ran by her head every name of every sailor she’d met there, every story she’d been told over campfires of where each sailor called home, and still she could remember absolutely no mention of Eleuthera, and her pride and vanity burned for fear of the possibility that she, _she,_ with her excellent memory, may have missed something.

 

The Ocean soon roared ahead and echoed in the rocks around her, and Eleanor could taste the salt spray in the air. There was the familiar sound of the ocean recoiling, and it felt as though the air itself held its breath. And then, there it was, the rush of water, and the crash of a wave against the rock as the air seemed to sigh in relief as it released its breath. The darkness of the cave gave way to the bright light of day. When Eleanor had cleared the edge of the caves, she looked back up to the old fort.

 

How few was the sum total of the people in Eleanor’s life: Her dear, darling Max and her kind and gracious Mr. Scott, both who looked upon her with adoring eyes and whose sheer and utter devotion to her could make her feel very much the part of a queen. And then there were those like Mrs. Mapleton and Captain Hornigold, who didn’t look to her in adoration, but who feared her father’s influence too much to dare cross her and were made to indulge her whether they liked it or not. Everyone else on the Island could be easily separated into two categories: Those who feared her and kept well out of her way, and those who fawned and flattered at her every word for hope that she may relate their kindness to her wealthy father. 

 

It was, she thought, as the world should be, and she was quite content that the world remain in those two simple and manageable categories of those who would indulge her and those who would fear her.

 

Eleanor looked then from the old fort to those rolling shores that had been forbidden to her. Nassau had yet no wharf nor proper port, so that men had to load their supplies and cargo on longboats and row them to shore. This they did until the line where the sand began to fade into the red clay of Nassau jutted out with ramshackle canvas tents, where men could be seen scurrying about from here to there like fastidious little ants, their curses and yells, their laughter and song calling out for miles inland. These were the camps, that bustling, vibrant heart of Nassau that had always held a hypnotic thrall to Eleanor, a call she’d never particularly cared to ignore.

 

Eleanor wasn’t entirely a fool, and knew well some of the dangers that could lurk in the camps, and she’d had her fair share of near misses. She knew well some of these men feared not her father, but she knew they did fear their Captains. And their ambitious Captains, with ships full of illicit goods illegal under French blockade and English Trade Laws, knew well to fear her father if only for that ominous and everpresent thread of the wrath of the Guthrie Trading Company.

 

Eleanor strolled into the camps with the hungry, eager curiosity she had felt since first she’d crossed that sandy Rubicon. And only when that line was crossed did she feel that peculiar rush of utter liberty, of knowing she was now far away from whatever loose rules governed her life, of feeling as though she had now stepped into a different world. Men dragged errant mules loaded with cotton and sugar, others shouted from tent to tent in that boisterous and mocking language of the sea. Some grinned and nodded their head at the strange little girl, others simply stepped over her or away from her as though she were as much a part of the camp as the small dogs and cats that followed the sailors from shore to ship. As the small creatures nipped for food and attention, so too did she hassle and harass in the hopes of winning a prize by way of information, or gold, or, being her favourite of all, another sea story.

 

These were nasty men and yet it was their company Eleanor enjoyed most, for they were free with their words as they were with their minds. They didn’t snivel and flutter like the puritan men, nor did they stare at her with the big cow eyes of the puritan women who would swoon and stutter in indignation at the slightest provocation. These men were petty thieves who made their living off scavenging sparsely populated outposts and looting small trading ships, and they laughed at her and teased her, and encouraged her to fight and to argue with the best of them. Most of the sailors who made camp at sleepy little Nassau were aging men now, and had about them that particular undercurrent of loneliness of men who still missed their homes and families. It were as though their loneliness only drove them to laugh harder, sing louder, and play tougher.

 

 Some would laugh heartily when she won a dispute or proved she could curse as eloquently as any one of them, as Hornigold did. Those who didn’t laugh were only too glad to settle their dispute with a hand of cards, and here she always won. Eleanor always got what she wanted in a game of cards, whether it was a pocket of Pesos or Reales, or the information that men seemed to naturally dole out while in the throes of a victorious hand. This information she would take to Hornigold or to whatever camp offered her the best recompense, and one way or the other, come nightfall Eleanor would always return home with her pockets full.

 

There were those of the camps who found her presence disturbing, and if word of her trespass were to reach their Captain, and were their Captain so hounded so as to complain to her father, Eleanor only considered that an added bonus. Anything that might cause Richard Guthrie a headache was always cause for celebration, the joy made only the sweeter if Eleanor were sure that her father knew it was she who was behind his troubles. In Eleanor’s mind, every escapade served well and good to remind her father that no matter what he tried, even by abandoning her and refusing to see her, he could not cause her to simply cease to exist just because it suited his fancy.

 

The only time she regretted her actions were when her father chose to admonish Mr. Scott. When that happened she would scrounge and save the money she won at cards to buy Mr. Scott one of his favourite Spanish cakes, which she would offer him with a demure apology, and all, she thought with that simple and utter confidence of a thirteen year old, would be well again.

 

The early afternoon sun began to move closer to the horizon. Eleanor had gone from tent to tent, she’d paid every courtesy and struck every conversation. She’d asked of families and friends, had been regaled with tales of recent thrilling adventures where small pirate ships had expertly outmaneuvered French galleons to evade and escape the blockade, and had heard of the tragic stories of mad schemes for Spanish gold going horribly awry. Over cards she’d even heard of a six month long plan to steal from a Spanish trading post being undone by one drunken man who gave his crew’s plan away, for he was caught by the Spanish in a terribly compromising position with a donkey he’d mistaken for a woman.

 

But no one, from the _Aeneas_ to the _Hecuba,_ had heard anything about the mysterious ship that had made port at Eleuthera.

 

It was the unspoken quid pro quo of camp gossip that held Eleanor’s honour at stake that she, too, should divulge information when asked. And when she related what little she had heard of the mysterious ship, and of France’s position in Exuma, a certain gloom seemed to settle over the camp.

 

And then it happened that a stir began to come over the camp. Eleanor found this greatly disturbing, for her attentions had been diverted by a game of _Primeiro_ taking place at the Captain’s tentthat was proving tougher than usual, for the _Hecuba_ had recently taken among her crew a willowy Dutch boy who was proving unnaturally adept at the game. After an hour of hooting and ridicule Eleanor had come into the possession of a Queen and King of Hearts, but the rest of the hand was a dud. This annoyed her endlessly for she itched to put the haughty little farmboy well in his place.

 

“ _Captain_!” Came a cry, and before anyone could respond, the _Hecuba’s_ second mate along with the _Aenea’s_ first mate were panting at the mouth of the tent. Mr. Leonard, a normally composed and shrewd man with a pointed face and a complexion like rice paper, was huffing and panting so that he had gone a red so deep he looked about fit to burst.

 

Captain Heinrich jumped to his feet, “Get a hold of yourself, man! What is it?”

 

“The harbour—“ Mr. Thomas panted, and Eleanor felt sure that the man’s aging heart would give out there and then, “—Something—You should see—“

 

And here Mr. Thomas did collapse into a panting puddle at the tent. The men set off to leave, but Eleanor made no move. Eleanor always made it absolutely clear that she never abandoned a gamble after it had been made. She sat at the table, staring at her hands calmly, and she could feel the Dutch boy’s eager eyes jumping from her to the shore outside and back to her. She hummed and tilted her head as though nothing particular had happened, staring at her sad little hand as though it were the most charming thing on earth. There was a murmur rising from outside. The Dutch boy gave, curiosity got the better of him and he called a forfeit. The hand he slammed down would have killed her, but the forefeit was his, and no one was there to complain when she took the winnings.

 

If the French had indeed come, she thought as she put the gold into a heavily mended pocket sewn into the folds of her skirt, there was little she could do about it now, and there was no sense in letting good gold go to waste. She picked herself up calmly, for Nassau had survived thus far, and surely it could survive the French, and now it was surely too late for her to fret about it. And so she strolled out into the beach, calmly weaving her way between the long legs of the sailors who’d stopped dead in their tracks.

 

By the time she had reached the shore, Eleanor had had to drop to her hands and knees to squeeze her way past the tight knot of fretting men, who at present were more like the flittering matrons of New Providence than the vociferous sea men they’d bragged about being. Just goes to show! Thought Eleanor, finally breaking through that last throng and getting up to her feet, Men! She brushed the sand off her skirts and couldn’t help but smirking. Dread pirates of the sea, indeed! She turned to look upon the mighty French warship, upon the great conquering adversaries, the emissaries of that loathed French Crown that was enemy to all Englishmen and—

 

Eleanor blinked at the harbour.

 

The gulls were black against the sky and they called out their lazy song. The waves were calm. The sun shone, melting red into the sea and setting the sky into an orange blaze that made it look as though the whole of the horizon were being swallowed up by a great and terrible fire.

 

\--And there was nothing.

 

Eleanor stood there, stunned for a minute. There was no great warship, no great galleon, there was absolutely nothing. She looked around her at the men but still they stood their ground. Eleanor looked back out to the ocean, glowing red as the embers in a fireplace. Had they seen a ghost? Had they all gone mad? Was this somesort of a trick?

 

And then she saw it.

 

It was small, miniscule. Just a tiny flutter of movement, so small that she could almost miss it. And then there it was again. Eleanor looked out to that stretch of water as the harbour began to dance in a riot of yellows and oranges and reds in the sunset.

 

That movement again. Her eyed adjusted.

 

Suddenly, Eleanor realized just what it was she was looking at.

 

In the dire silence of the camp, where every man looked as pale and shocked as if they had seen the Devil himself rising up out of the Ocean, it was Eleanor who had to fight back a laugh! There it was, rowing steadily towards them. The cause of the panicked second mate, the horror of the dread pirates—Eleanor stared, for surely she must be mistaken.

 

But no, there it was. There was but a small little smudge on the harbour, barely visible. A tiny little fishing sloop, so diminutive so as to be invisible and rendered but a small black shadow in the blazing sunset. And there, striking from it and rowing steadily towards the shore was but one, tiny little longboat!

 

She couldn’t laugh, but Eleanor didn’t even bother to fight back a smile. Some grand French vessel, indeed! If the French intended to invade Nassau with one Longboat, then Nassau surely deserved to be well invaded! And yet that one little boat had driven Hornigold into a fit right proper for some genteel and doe eyed debutante and had frozen all these men solid? Eleanor shook her head and dashed forward, and she laughed then, and she heard as the sound rolled in the wind.

 

The boat came closer to shore, closer still until Eleanor could make out the faces of its passengers. One she recognized as John Bercham, a merchant from—and here her mind reeled, a merchant known to have a house in _Eleuthera._ Ofcourse, thought Eleanor _._ But Hornigold knew Bercham and everyone knew his little vessel, and seeing it make dock would should not have caused anyone to bat an eye.

 

No, thought Eleanor, and her eyes wandered to the men that shared Bercham’s boat. No, these were not Bercham’s men. She could scarce make them out in the hot red light, but the manner of their clothes and hair was something utterly peculiar and foreign to her. It was a mess of Indian silks and African cottons, some carried about them what looked to be African ivory at their necks and Jade daggers from Arabia at their belts. And yet for all this finery, their clothes were as dirty and worn out as the cheap linens and woolens worn by the men standing behind her. They were all deeply tanned with the sun from seas she’d only ever read about, and even their tans were further darkened by a solid caking of dirt and soot about their faces. The last, at least, she had long grown accustomed to, for sailors did so seem to take pride in forsaking water at any costs.

 

The boat came nearer and her own curiosity drew her closer, so that she could feel the water licking at her feet. The man who stood next to Bercham was tall and lean, and had that erect posture and dignified air that seemed to come inherent to men who had served under the English Kings. By his side there were two men of similar age and general disposition, who could easily fit in with the men behind her with but one change of clothes.

 

No, it was the men at the front of the boat that stood out as something not quite entirely right with anything she had seen before, something that didn’t quite fit. There was a man—barely a man, somewhere around the age of the Dutch boy, surely. And he had a most terribly peculiar look to him, though it should be told that the strange manner of his hair and wild flamboyance of his clothes didn’t help the generally bizarre look to him by one bit. He had about him a most distinctive look—and Eleanor suddenly found herself reminded of a goose she had once chased halfway through the Island, for indeed, he was tall and thin and stretched as a goose. He was pointing and gesturing wildly around him as though his eyes could never quite settle in one place too long, as though everything around him fascinated him as much as he’d fascinated the men behind her.

 

Next to that boy stood a much smaller, terribly young boy. How young, she could not tell, for his face was mostly hidden under a large hat, but certainly he had the build of but a child much younger than she. His gaze she could not follow, for his eyes were so well hidden in shadows.

 

And then it was she who suddenly felt a most peculiar weight at the edge of her vision. A certain and unmistakable feeling came over her, and she knew, with that strange and ancient instinct all humans seem to possess, that at that moment somebody was staring at her.

 

There was one last figure on the ship. He stood next to the goose looking fellow, and though shorter, he seemed to be of the same general age. Even among these strange men with their strange clothes, this one particular man stood out as being even stranger. Everything about him, from his long and wild hair to the way he threw his shoulders back and folded his arms before him seemed perfectly calculated to make him seem bigger than he was, more threatening. For some reason, Eleanor found herself reminded of a matron of New Providence, who kept about her a small and rather yappy dog. Though the dog was smaller than any other creature on the Island, it would puff itself up and bark up a storm as though it were the biggest and baddest thing that had ever cowed New Providence, and in this it would persist until it got its way and every other animal gave it the wide berth they’d give a mountain lion. It was a peculiar thought and seemed to have come out of nowhere, and yet the comparison between this boy who seemed so intent on looking threatening, and old Matron Johnson’s small dog yapping away that all should fear it made Eleanor smirk despite herself.

 

It was at that moment that Eleanor realized who it was that had been staring so intently at her. Eleanor met the boy’s eyes then. The boat was close enough to shore now that she could begin to make out the features of the boy’s face, but she refused to look away from the boy’s peculiar eyes, so bright that they seemed to burn with a fire brighter than the water that blazed around him.

 

Despite all the careful calculation that had clearly gone into giving him an overall look of general threat, the boy seemed, at that particular moment, to be utterly hellbent on _glaring_ her to death.

 

His eyes went over her in gaze totally devoid of the deference she was normally used to. Eleanor smirked, but she felt something else come to a blaze deep within her heart. Something in his look challenged her ego and brought to her a fire that was equally fascination and utter dislike. Oh, she thought, this would not do. It occurred to her then that the newcomer probably didn’t realise who she was, for if he did he never would have stared at her in such an utterly impudent way. Were she to make herself known and demand an apology, she was sure he would instantly beg her forgiveness. And yet, for once, Eleanor was finding it quite difficult to believe that, and this annoyed her terribly.

 

No, she thought again, and she smiled at him more for it only seemed to make him glare all the harder, this would not do. And then it was that Eleanor realised what that strange electric sensation she had felt was. Her smile widened, her back straightened, and she cocked her head at the new challenger. It was, indeed, in his eyes, in his body, something that seemed to radiate from his very being— a tangible sort of impertinence and insolence in his bright eyes that made something within her gnaw to subdue him.

 

What Eleanor had felt was the thrill of a challenge.


	6. Chapter 2 : Of Friends and Orphans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crew makes port in Nassau to present a mysterious letter to Captain Hornigold. Jack takes Vane to celebrate his shoreleave with a trip to Noonan’s brothel. Eleanor gets a disturbing visit. Vane confronts his Captain and is sent to shore.

CHAPTER TWO

 

OF FRIENDS AND ORPHANS

 

_April 1, 1696_

 

Vane could feel the small boat coming to the wall of sand where the Ocean began to give way to shore. Already he could see them up ahead, aging sailors and merchantmen, pirates all under the King’s decree. Lazy waves crashed against the golden shore in an explosion of seafoam as the tide began to pull in with the setting sun, and Vane stood quite still as he took this new place around him. His mood had long ran foul on the notion of returning to this most wretched corner of the world, but the Island that stood before him bore little resemblance to the tropical prison of his boyhood.

“Is it true what they say?” He heard an oarsman whisper behind him, “No law at all?”

Here came Rackham’s voice, gratingly chipper against Vane’s soured nerves, “When the old Dutch governor kicked it, no one stepped forth to claim the land. As the Island is beholden to no country, it is not bound to any country’s laws.”

Jennings laughed, as though he too had succumbed to Jack’s enthusiasm, “No laws and a sea full of Spanish gold. What is a man to do?”

The excitement on the little boat was palpable, but Vane’s mood was decidedly grim. Where the others could see only the prospect of gold, he saw an insignificant little outpost, a shabby shore dotted with decrepit tents that looked no bigger than pinheads on the sand. Already he could see the men on the shore stopping in their tracks to stare at their approach. It was the kind of entrance he welcomed, at least, for their fear of his Captain’s reputation rendered those men slack jawed and stupid as a heard of cows set to pasture.

 

The shore was beginning to glow a pure gold. The sun blazed bright red behind him and made the red clay glow. Slowly he saw it then, but a small childish figure that wove its way in and out of the men among the camp as naturally as the seagulls swooped overhead. At first he thought it a small boy of the crews, perhaps, in clothes that fit far too loose. But there came a gust of wind that skimmed over the water, and a gleaming cloud of hair blew out from behind the creature and sent white skirts kicking about her as she made her way to the shore, and he heard then a high and girlish laughter carrying on the wind.

 

At first glance, it was as though the ocean foam in all its white and golden spray had sprung into human form and taken movement. The crash of the waves and the call of the gulls, and a wild and musical laugh—what was it they were all bringing to mind? And then he had it—Months, no, years ago, when first he had boarded the _Fancy_ , the men had gathered round the deck of the ship on watch and began to trade stories of the sea. Many of them had sworn on the graves of sainted mothers to have seen mysterious creatures born of the water, beautiful women who rose out of the sea and called to men with sweet voices, only to pull them down to their deaths at the bottom of the ocean.

 

Vane narrowed his eyes, and for a moment he found himself wondering if this were what he stared at. But as the boat neared the shore, he could discern nothing of the supernatural, only of the utterly bizarre. There she stood a barefooted contradiction, pale skinned and pale haired and as regal in pose as those women of England and Port Elizabeth. She wore the clothes of a rich woman, but her hair was wild and unkempt and had ensnared its share of foxgloves and sea reeds, and he could see the stains of muddied sand and red clay on the hem and knees of her fine clothes. It was a very human visage, but like nothing he’d ever seen before.

 

A small face turned to him then, and Vane found, much to his irritation, that this small and decidedly high born face did not turn away from him with the meek obeisance he felt his proper due. He narrowed his eyes and willed the odd creature to fear, but this only seemed- and here his irritation began to bubble into outright indignation – to amuse her. The girl did not look away in fear as she should, but she did not look away in disgust at the sight of him as other women like her once had, either. This peculiar girl tilted her head back and met his gaze, unflinching, unmoving, and a smile crossed her face, full of challenge and arrogance.

 

“—Vane?”

 

Time seemed to stand still as they stared at each other then, her eyes proud, her smile mocking him. The more Vane glared, the more arrogant the girl’s countenance seemed to grow.

 

“Vane!” Jack’s voice broke through his reverie.

 

Vane turned then with an irritated snap, “ _What_?”

 

Jennings stared in shock at Vane’s reaction, for it was unusual to see the boy snap so suddenly. “God’s blood, man, what has irked you so?”

 

And Vane turned then to point to the bizarre creature that stood on the sand. “That girl, she’s—“ But he was too late— Vane turned to point at a spot in the sand that now stood empty. She was gone. For a moment, Vane wondered if he had actually hallucinated the whole thing.

 

Jack roared with laughter, “Been at sea too long, have you? Don’t worry, not long now. We’re nearly to shore and night’s soon upon us, you needn’t be snapping at girls that aren’t there when we can find you a nice piece of cunny that won’t disappear into thin air.”

 

One of the oarsmen chuckled with a knowing air that was, at that moment, annoyingly condescending, “I think it’s high time for it too, lad’s already started to hallucinate. Worry not, boy, worry not. we’ll make sure Rackham sees to it that you get your due.”

 

Jack laughed and here Vane stared, bewildered, swinging his gaze between his crew mate’s cryptic laughing and the shoreline that had apparently swallowed up a girl. His confused expression only caused the men on the small boat to laugh all the harder.

 

All that was, save for one. It was only then that Vane swung around and caught sight of Jennings’ face. As the men on the boat hummed with excitement for what lay ahead and traded plans for debauchery, Vane saw how his first mate’s face remained as cold and immobile as though ahead if him lay not some forgotten port city, but some dire visage of a scaffold and a noose.

 

***

 

Nassau was a far cry from the cobbled streets and warm glows of Port Royal. The roads here had never been paved with cobblestones and were of a red clay that squelched underfoot and seemed to be perpetually soggy. The streets, if they could be called such, were really narrow mud lanes that had been torn into the red ground, and these reeked with the smell of rotting garbage and human waste. The closely packed buildings were of that two story beige plaster and dark wood frame that betrayed a Spanish influence on the city’s construction. The air buzzed with flies and mosquitoes.

 

Vane, Jack and Anne followed after Jennings past a very scarce selection of trading shops, hardware merchants, one abandoned tavern, and a larger, though still abandoned looking, tavern that seemed to belie an inn and brothel in the upper floor. Indeed, as Vane looked around, if anything tied the minimal village together, it was how utterly desolate an abandoned it seemed. Houses were still intact, and food had been placed in some window sills where it still sat, having been left to rot there. It were as though most of the Island’s inhabitants had been going about their normal day until suddenly vanishing into thin air. Vane had seen more men at the camps than he’d seen in the entirety of Nassau’s streets.

 

“Well, at least we won’t have to worry about waiting in line at the tavern,” Jack laughed nervously. No one else made a sound.

 

When Vane looked to Jack’s eyes, he saw the apprehension there. Anne’s hand was already hovering over her gun. There was a grim, overbearing silence. It were as though they were all expecting the villagers to suddenly jump out from behind those silent walls and mob them.

 

They made their way through the stinking and abandoned streets until they came to the foot of a hill that lead up to an old stone fort. Here there were no proper pathways, only the rough paths beaten into the ground by the goats and oxen that had once had free reign of the Island.

 

It was climbing up these paths that Vane could have sworn he caught the slightest flash of movement out of the corner of his eye, something following them by way of the coast. But when he turned, he found nothing there.

 

Vane had never had about him a nervous nature, but this strange and paranoid behaviour he chalked up to the village’s bizarre atmosphere and his recently over active imagination.

 

The first sign of life outside the beach came by way of the men posted to guard the gate of the old fort. Vane noted these men too looked to be much older than the average crewmember of the _Fancy_ , and they had about them the same hard expression and upright postures as Jennings and Avery had, so that Vane came to suspect the ghost of the English Navy hung as heavy here as it did in his Captain’s quarters. Jennings introduced himself to these men as one Henry Adams, and said he sought to speak with the captain of the fort in regards to access of his harbour. The men, perhaps for recognizing a kindred spirit in Jennings, allowed this.

 

They were lead into a large stone hall that had been built to serve a garrison. Instead, they only found one man seated at the end of the hall. And had of him a certain stoutness. His beady little eyes went bright with fury and recognition when he beheld Jennings’ face.

 

“Henry Adams, is it?” His face slid into an unpleasant smile.

 

“Captain Hornigold.”

 

The air hung low and heavy with mutual, and ancient, dislike.

 

Vane shot Jack a look but Jack looked as bewildered as Vane felt.

  
“My Captain asked that I should be present when I gave you this.” He flourished a roll of parchment then, “Have I your… Permission to approach?”

 

“You may.” Hornigold said with all the authority of a regnant King.

 

When Vane beheld the mysterious letter he looked back to Jack. Rackham did meet his eyes then and the two boys seemed to communicate in that unspoken language of men, and the sentiment could be best expressed thus:

 

 _The fuck_? _Did you know about this?_

_I didn’t know about this, did you know about this?_

_I don’t fucking know anything. The fuck is going on?_

 

Both boys swung their heads back forward when they heard Jennings’ voice.

 

“In your hands you hold a letter written in the hand of my captain and signed by him. We arrive to you from Port Elizabeth, our ship is in need of provisions and our men are in need of shoreleave. If you should let us bring our ship to shore with your—“ his eyes shone maliciously, “—Most honest guarantee that our ship will not be harmed by your cannons or your men, my captain assures you that you should be most amply rewarded.”

 

“By which matter of reward?

 

“You stand before me now with a letter from some man I’ve never met, calling yourself by an alias? Why should I trust you?”

 

“My captain thought you might say that.” Jennings produced then another roll of parchment which he placed before Hornigold. “That letter is in a hand you should find more familiar, and it vouches for my captain’s honesty and his claim that a meeting is to take place between him and Mr. Guthrie.”

 

“You mentioned a reward?”

 

Jennings’ jaw went tight. “You can read my captain’s letter for yourself.”

 

“Indeed, but what of my men? What should keep them from firing into your ship?”

 

“I should think you know damn well why.”

 

“I have no eyes on the back of my head, and even a man must sleep at some point. I cannot be held accountable for my men’s actions when I am in the throes of sleep.”

 

“The crew, then, would be ready to reward your men’s kindness.”

 

“How ready?”

 

“Twenty pieces of eight and two pieces of gold from the ship’s coffers, and fourty pieces of eight and four pieces of gold from my own provision. Along with what is promised to you in the letter you hold.”

 

Hornigold’s dark and beady eyes glowed with a satisfaction that no gold could buy. Vane saw how Jenning’s shoulders had risen and tensed.

 

“Have we your permission to bring our ship into the harbour?” Jennings said, and his face twisted as though asking this man for permission brought him physical pain.

 

“I see no reason why a merchant ship set on doing honest business should be turned away.”

 

“Your reputation for honesty proceeds you.” There was a bitter note of mockery in his voice.

 

“It’s an honest trade.”

 

Hornigold made a derisive sound, a mirthless cough of a laugh, “Whenever I think of honest trade I think of… What was it? Ah yes, Henry Adams.”

 

Jennings’ saw clenched and his eyes were bright with a response he dare not utter.

 

Vane’s patience finally snapped, “If you have something to wish to say to our First Mate, might I advise you on simply saying it, rather than weaseling around the issue.”

 

Hornigold’s eyes turned on Vane then, “Mr. _Adams,_ I would advise you to instruct your men to hold their tongues.”

 

Jennings shot Vane a look that would have made any other man wither, but Vane’s nerves were already fried, and he was quickly growing tired of the old man’s attitude and disrespect for his first mate.

 

Jennings looked to Hornigold, “My apologies. As I said, the men are in need of shoreleave, and I believed the prolonged time at sea has made then forget themselves.”

 

Vane opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, Jennings was excusing them and heading for the door.

 

Outside, no one spoke a word. Jennings did not allow room for questions and began quickly leading the men back down the hell.

 

“Mr. Jennings,” It was Vane’s voice that broke the silence. Jack winced at the sound, “if I may have a word, sir?”

 

Jennings turned and Jack felt that surely then he would actually kill Vane. Instead, when Jennings turned, he nodded his head amiably. “Certainly.”

 

Jennings lead the boy to the shade of a cluster of nearby magnolia trees, “What ails you, boy?”

 

“That man in the fort, he is an acquaintance of yours?” Vane made it a question.

 

“Of ages past.”

 

“Is he to be trusted?”

 

“Not for the slightest moment.”

 

Vane’s face hardened. “Then I would wish to return with you to the ship.”

 

“And forsake your shoreleave? You are a boy of many firsts, I will give you that. You believe the man plans to attack us, do you?”

 

“Something hasn’t felt right since we first landed on this Island.”

 

“And you believe this to be because of Hornigold?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Jennings smiled ruefully, “You are a smart boy, Vane. Far too smart, I should say.”

 

“Sir?”

 

“Your request is denied. You’ve grown tense, it’s making you paranoid. Don’t think I didn’t notice your absence on the Sawai.”

 

Vane gaped, “But, I—Surely you must have noticed it, yourself, for I saw you--“

 

“Stand down on this one, that is an order.” And Vane saw then how Jennings’ hands had balled into fists at his side.

 

***

 

Eleanor fell behind the walls of the fortress. Her face had grown red and her eyes flashed with dangerous anger.

 

“So, little spider. What do you make of that, then?” Came the drawling voice from beyond the wall, and Eleanor felt irritated that it should break her out of her dark reverie.

 

“Did you know?” Eleanor growled, pulling her knees up against her chest.

 

“What?” Hornigold asked as he stared at what appeared to be an empty room. “Of your father?”

 

 

Hornigold sighed, “No, child, I can’t say as I did. If what was written on that letter is true he should be on his way sometime soon.”

 

“Do you believe him?”

 

“The man who introduced himself as Henry Adams is many things, a liar is not one of them.”

 

Another long stretch of silence. Hornigold shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. Eleanor Guthrie was one of those rare creatures whose emotions seemed contagious in their extremity, and it felt now as though the walls themselves were radiating with her rage. “So much for the dread invasion, eh? They wish to trade in silks and tea, they say.” He said in the trepidatious voice one would use on a lion cub.

 

Eleanor made a sound like a mocking and mirthless bark of a laugh, “Tea! Tea my nose! It smells gunpowder, not tea.”

 

“So it is, so it is,” Hornigold nodded his head. He walked to the window and there he could see them, the small handful of men, some he recognized, some too young to be of importance. And there, at their head, a face he had never thought to see again in his life.

 

“And what, pray tell, do you believe they intend to do with the gunpowder that so offended your senses?”

 

Hornigold was met only with the dawning blue light of twilight, and a sheer windy silence.

 

***

 

Eleanor had not stuck around to hear what the old todger had to say. France, spices, invasions, to hell with all of it. Her heart pounded in her chest, and she clung to the rage that grew there, for she refused to succumb to the alternative.

 

She dashed down the hill and cared little then if she was seen by the strangers or not. Her feet took her in the dark of twilight to the decrepit and forgotten manor that lay in the foothills that overlooked Nassau, once the greatest home in all of New Providence. A singular window glowed from one of the few windows that had not been boarded up or left without glass since the last hurricane, or the one before it.

 

Eleanor crashed through the front door into the hush of what had once been her family home. A door lay on the ground, a door she’d locked earlier in a prank that was now forgotten. She followed the dim glow of the candle down dark and empty halls where only dusty outlines remained where furniture had once sat. Eleanor crashed into her father’s old officer.

 

Mr. Scott did not turn around at the sound of angry little footsteps, nor did he swing around at the slamming of a door. He knew Eleanor well enough to know when to not indulge her moods. He took his time turning to her then, his dark eyes calm and with a well rehearsed boredom,

 

“Next time you should think to lock me in a room, let me suggest that you check that room first for any tools,” Here Mr. Scott held up a screwdriver, for even if he was Eleanor’s guardian and senior, he was still but a boy of nineteen, and had found some semblance of his youth in his ward’s lively ways.

 

Eleanor did not laugh. Mr. Scott saw her then. He saw the cold fury in her eyes, her hair and skirts having been whipped about her as though she’d ridden there on the winds of a hurricane. Belying all that, there it was, a deep look of pain and betrayal.

 

“Did you know?”

 

Mr. Scott’s breath caught, and he released it in a sigh. “As of your locking me in the pantry this morning, no, I did not.” He gestured then to the parchment that lay before him, “I only got word a few hours ago.”

 

Mr. Scott got up from the small escritoire that had belonged to his employer—his master, once—and went to Eleanor.

 

“I know this is difficult, Eleanor, but you must control your temper.”

 

“Why should I?”

 

Mr. Scott sank to her knees before the girl and tilted her chin so she could look up at him.

 

“You are clever girl, Eleanor, but you are not wise.” Mr. Scott’s dark eyes grew heavy with worry, “No matter how repugnant he may seem to you, you must do your very best to please him.”

 

“As you did?” She burst out, “You pleased him and yet here you find yourself every bit as much an exile as I!” Her voice crackled with fury, “Why must he come back now? Why doesn’t he just return to Boston and stay there forever and ever?”

 

“Because, my dear, he does not wish to return to Boston. And neither should you, should you know what’s best for you.”

 

“I doubt it. Better to have a monster for a grandfather than a coward for a father!”

 

“You say that only because you haven’t met him.”

 

“How fearsome could he be, to have given blood to the likes of my father, maid-in-the-pants as he is?”

 

Mr. Scott’s dark eyes narrowed at the strange colloquialism, “You’ve been buzzing about the pirates again, haven’t you?”

 

Eleanor pouted and looked away, “I don’t see why I oughtn’t.”

 

“Eleanor, I have told you time and time again—You are forbidden to go to those camps! I have written to your father of your escapades and I gave him my word I would stop you! What do you think he’ll do if he finds out you still play among the pirates?”

 

Eleanor swung around back to him then, her face contorted as that of a little sea-fury, “You dare to try to forbid me!” She roared and broke free of his grasp, “But I will go to those camps as often as I please! If it should displease my father, then let him tell me of it, if he can bring himself to face me!”

 

Mr. Scott rose to his feet, “Impudent cub, to speak of your father like that!”

 

Those blue eyes blazed up at him. Eleanor threw her head back and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her with enough force that the walls shook.

 

Mr. Scott sighed and sank into his chair, and not for the first time he found himself at a loss for what to do.

 

The privilege, as Mr. Guthrie had deigned call it, of Mr. Scott’s education had come as a double edged dagger. The life of a slave could never be called a good or even a simple one, but to have been born into the cruel chains of servitude, he had never known another life. The books he read had given wings to notions of the liberty and freedom that should be open to all men and had been denied him and his people, and opened his mind to worlds beyond those he had known in servitude. The more he had read the more he had come to despise the institution of slavery, and among it those who had taken upon itself to rob Mr. Scott and those like him from their home and families only to strip them away of their human dignity.

 

When Mrs. Guthrie died and Mr. Guthrie fled from the Island, Mr. Scott had resolved his mind that he should take the opportunity and flee. To where he would go he knew not, for his family were long since passed, and the Guthrie family had a terrible way of making all manner of paper traces on a slave simply disappear. He had felt terribly and utterly alone in the world. But he did know he would not stay on this Island to play nursemaid to some little white girl, in whose veins there ran the blood of those very same people that would deny him and his people their God given freedom.

 

He would spent the night running through his head various possibilities for the life that awaited him beyond. Always he came across some obstacle that might lead him back to the yokes of slavery, so that he would often spend the night awake and fancying all sorts of wild notions.

 

It was on one of these nights, barely a few days since the funeral of Mrs. Guthrie, that Mr. Scott had heard a sound coming from his door. He saw her there, then. That small, palid little ghost of a child he thought most unnatural, for when the deceased Mrs. Guthrie had been found, Eleanor had been found lying next to her in bed. Never once had the child screamed, nor cried. She simply lay there, clutching at the hand of her dead mother with such force he had had to pry the dead woman’s hands free from the child’s iron grip. Mr. Scott felt a chill that ran down to his soul when he saw her standing in the dark, staring at him. He saw, then, that she carried a pillow in her arms, and the blanket from her bed dragged behind her. At first he thought her some sleepwalker, but it soon became apparent that this was not the case. Thinking him asleep, the girl snuck into his room and crawled under his bed. Mr. Scott had been stunned into paralysis. He heard the scuffling as the girl laid out her blanket beneath his bed, set down her pillow and went to sleep. Mr. Scott had not known what to make of this.

 

This most bizarre behaviour he did not question the previous morning. Curiosity kept him awake that night, and indeed, without much wait, there came the padding footsteps down the hall, the small silhouette at his door, and the quiet breathing under his bed.

 

For soon he found that no matter where he went in the manor, he was sure to hear those silent padding footsteps. The girl, some thought rendered mute by the shock of her mother’s death, made no effort to hide her behaviour. When he went to the kitchen, there she followed. When he went to the gardens, there she followed. It was only on the occasion where Mr. Scott had been in want of a bath that he had picked the child up to set her out in the hallway. Even then, with the door locked, Mr. Scott could hear her sitting there outside his door.

 

Slowly Eleanor’s strange behaviour began to make sense in Mr. Scott’s mind. Mr. Scott understood then that that child had become driven by a great and terrible aversion to being left alone.

 

His plans to flee did not change, but merely, he decided, had been postponed. His heart went out to the girl who clutched at his hand and mimicked his movements. He would always recall those first days when food had begun to become scarce. Due to blockade, Mr. Scott had to learn to utilize the fields behind the manor, a task he abhorred for he had always been taught by his fellow brothers in Boston that such task was the labour of a field hand, and thus beneath his dignity. The noon sun had been blisteringly hot so that he could barely bare it. He had to excuse himself from the field so that he may regain his wits about him. When he’d taken shade under a cypress tree he watched, stunned, as the girl had picked up the very plow he’d been towing, and set about mimicking his earlier actions. He did not stop her for he was certain the girl would grow tired or bored soon enough, but she set her silent face in that resolute manner and did not stop until he could take the plow from her. He knew he should admonish her this, for such a thing was utterly unthinkable for a white child, but the truth was he welcome the company, and soon he became used to his little shadow, his companion in learning the ways of running a house.

 

She had gone two months without speaking when Mr. Scott had fallen ill. She refused to speak to her father, and she glared at the women of New Adelaide in such a way that they soon stopped calling. But when Mr. Scott had fallen ill with a bout of malaria, the girl had broken her vow of silence. Her small voice had been coarse from disuse, but she held his hand through his fevers and curled up next to him as he’d slept. Nassau was always scarce of doctors, but later Mr. Scott would hear of how the girl had used her fluttering lashes and even tears to arrange a ride for herself to New Adelaide where she could procure for him a doctor.

 

After his recovery, Mr. Scott decided his plans for escape should be put off yet again, for though the girl was now recovered of her speech, it was obvious she still could not be left alone.

 

This had not bothered him as much as he had thought, for though Mr. Scott despised the Guthrie family, he soon found that there were some benefits to working as Richard Guthrie’s personal liaison in the port of Nassau. Richard was of a pompous and conceited nature that had aggravated Mr. Scott from the first, but if one thing could be said for him, Richard Guthrie did not discriminate when it came to matters of money.

 

If Mr. Scott’s plans for escape should be postponed, he found he could at least use his newfound power to aid others in their own plans. Word soon spread in hushed whispers of the safe haven of Nassau, where an escaped man or woman from the fields of Haiti, Hispaniola or Cuba could find safe refuge until acquiring transit papers and transportation to wherever they wished to go-- had one about them plenty of cash money, ofcourse. Religious fervour made the white citizens of New Adelaide adverse to the very idea of slavery, and though this by no means tempered their attitude towards the Black race, they could at least be trusted to not welcome any slavers onto their shores nor to sell runaways back to their captors. Mr. Scott’s name and Richard Guthrie’s access to all sorts of legal documents of questionable origins soon made Nassau grow famous among those who dreamed of a place where they need not fear capture, and gave hope to those who dreamed of a life beyond an overseer’s lash.

 

So it was that Mr. Scott’s and Eleanor’s life begun to settle into a calm sort of ritual. During the day he hoped to engage Eleanor in the same studies that had so engaged him. Eleanor had been a difficult student when her mother had been alive, and had gone through tutors as quickly as she had gone through dresses. Then, without her mother’s sobering presence or the flow of money to finance tutors, the girl had become downright impossible. She latched onto books with a hungry fervour, devouring the works of Plato and Aristotle and Moore with a single minded determination that had made Mr. Scott swell with pride. But then, as soon as she was done with these, she grew bored, and restless, and soon she came to find a great deal of amusement in passing the time by finding ways to escape him and dash about Nassau. Mr. Scott knew she had been consumed with the same curiosity of the world that he had when first he had learned to read, but Eleanor had about her her father’s insatiable greed, and now that she had been introduced to stories of a world beyond the Island, she would stop at nothing from getting more—even if it meant sneaking off into the pirate camps to have her head filled with stories of tragic Chinese princesses and powerful Indian queens.

 

Though he did enjoy putting up a great show of struggle, these excursions of hers worked to Mr. Scott’s benefit, for they opened the afternoons for him to go about Richard Guthrie’s business dealings, and then to see to his own affairs, checking up on the recent arrivals from the slave fields or seeing to letters from those he’d helped to escape.

 

And then there came the nights. He’d tuck Eleanor into bed, make his way to his bedroom, and simply lie in bed. Like clockwork, there she would come.

 

Mr. Scott had been contemplating surprising the girl by building her a small cot beneath his bed, for he knew the girl thought herself brilliantly sneaky and probably did not think he knew of her nightly excursions. How her face would look when she found a bed there waiting for her!

 

But then there came that ship. Mr. Scott would never forget the day there came a ship from Haiti. He had gone to shore, for he knew in the cargo bay there he would find four escaped people whose passports and travel arrangements he had seen to in the previous week. Eleanor had stood by his side as the passengers were rowed to shore.

 

He’d never forget the way that little girl had looked then.

 

She had been on the boat, and though dirty and disheveled, her dark hair wild about her, she had been of a unique and breathtaking beauty. Her skin was of that complexion he had heard referred to on the Guthrie plantation as high yellow, but her face held such a mixture of places and origins that he knew not what to make of her. Her hair was as dark and thin as the native women he had seen on a trip to Hispaniola, but curly as a Black woman’s. Her eyes were of a most unique colour, a bright green that seemed to shift between blue and grey as the light jumped from the waves around her. Mr. Scott had a vague recollection of women like her, from those far-off times of his childhood in Haiti before he had been transferred to the main Guthrie house in Boston. French merchantmen and naval officers who took Black women for themselves, and sometimes, compelled by love and alcohol, they even took them to wives. The streets of Haiti had run wild with children with dark complexions and clear eyes, or light complexions and curly hair. Children who had once been the apple of their father’s eyes, until better marriage prospects had called them back to their native land, and their wives and children were left abandoned and destitute.

 

His heart had broken when he saw that it was Noonan and Mrs. Mapleton that waited for this pretty little girl.

 

But Mr. Scott had not been the only one that noticed the strange and beautiful girl.

 

That night as he had poured over the accounts of four families that had run from a plantation in the southern part of Florida, he heard Eleanor laughing in the downstairs parlour. He went to see what the fuss was about and saw then the mysterious girl from the boat. She looked at Eleanor and he saw a reflection of himself on the girl’s expression, the wide-eyed way which she stared at that small and bizarre little creature that flitted about her excitedly with the quick and excited movements of a hummingbird. Eleanor grabbed her by the hand and simply lead her this way and that as she had often done with Mr. Scott, and like Mr. Scott, this girl seemed too stunned by the girl’s wild ways to refuse her.

 

That night, Eleanor did not appear at his door to come under his bed.

 

Worried, Mr. Scott had gone to her bedroom then. There he had found the two girls, barely strangers, and yet they slept in the same bed, curled around each other like kittens.

 

So there started a new ritual in the old Guthrie manor. In the morning he would find Mrs. Mapleton, fit to a rage on the doorstep until she beheld him. Her countenance would flip and she would bat her thin eyelashes and ask if he had seen “that little thing.” She would then the girl Max away, and Max would look to Eleanor with a wave and Eleanor would wave back.

 

The day would go about its usual routine, and then at night, as Mr. Scott poured over his studies, he’d hear the sound of the two girls laughing well past the time they ought to be asleep.

 

And that was how Max had become a part of their lives.

 

He could hear her now, her gentle knock on the front door.

 

Mr. Scott went to meet her. “She’s run upstairs.”

 

“Is everything alright?”

 

“Her father.”

 

Max’s arched brows drew to a worried not, “He isn’t—“

 

“Tomorrow.”

 

Max looked at Mr. Scott almost apologetically, “I’ll speak with her.”

 

“I think she would like that. And I would be in your debt if you could find a way to convince her not to strike at her father, lest he should come to think I’ve turned his daughter into a wildcat.”

 

Max laughed that rich musical laugh Mr. Scott knew would be the undoing of many men, “That I cannot promise you.”

 

***

 

Indeed, when Max had found Eleanor, the latter’s angry mood hung over the room like the raging torrents of a flood. Eleanor did not move to acknowledge Max.

 

Max stripped of her dirty clothes until she was in her shift and slid into bed next to Eleanor. Still, Eleanor did not speak.

 

“You know those strange men you had seen?”

 

No response.

 

“I saw them heading for the tavern, you know.”

 

“I don’t care.”

 

Max’s face fell at Eleanor’s clipped tone, and Eleanor instantly regretted it. “I’m sorry, I’m just in a foul mood.”

 

“Mr. Scott told me.”

 

There was a silence between the two girls.

 

“Is there anything you would like to do that would make you feel better?”

 

Eleanor pouted, but Max smiled when she saw a light spark in her friend’s eyes. “I suppose I could go look at the new ship.”

 

And Max laughed, for the peculiar hobby was somehow charming on Eleanor. As Eleanor’s rages were notoriously contagious, so too was Max’s joyful laugh, and Eleanor found herself soon smiling despite herself.

 

“There,” Max smiled, “See? You need not worry about your father’s visit. What he took away from you once he will never be able to take away again.” Max scooted closer to Eleanor so that the two girls’ foreheads touched and Max looked into Eleanor’s eyes, “One day you shall grow beautiful, so that all who see you will come to love you and adore you, and you will never again be as lonely as you once were.”

 

Eleanor smiled then, her spirits rising despite her effort otherwise, for the thought did comfort her. Max saw how the tension sank from Eleanor’s shoulders, how those fierce and angry lines disappeared from her face.

 

And Eleanor thought then that she would be lost without Max.

 

***

 

Night had settled on Nassau and candles glowed from a few scarce windows. Jennings had set off back to the _Fancy_ to give the news to Avery, and the first round of men had been given their shore leave. Jack, Anne and Vane had been among the first to enjoy this privilege for their earlier services.

 

Their first stop was the tavern. Here the lights glowed dim and orange with flickering candles that sent long shadows dancing across a sea of empty chairs and abandoned tables. An atrium at its middle opened to the night where a moonless sky seemed to fall over the place like a dark blanket and only emphasized the barren nature of the place, for as they waited for the rest of the men, it was only Jack and Vane and Anne who gave the place any semblance of life.

 

As the youngest members of the _Fancy_ took their places at the bar, there came to them then that most grotesque visage of the man whom all would soon know as Mr. Noonan. He was a tavern owner and a brothel owner, and no matter how well his establishment might fare, he seem perpetually covered in a thick layer of grime and sweat. His thin lips slid into a smile so greasy it might as well have made his cheeks squelch, and he blinked his small beady eyes at the trio. “What can I do you for?”

 

Jack slammed down a small leather satchel, a small stack of silver pieces of eight spreading to the table. Noonan’s clammy hands brushed these off the table, “Four pieces of eight, boy? That much booze in ‘ye and you’ll be having a tough time staying in the saddle when the real festivities start, eh?”

 

“Inform your whores of our credit, and pour me and my friends a goddamn drink.”

 

A woman came by then, grey-haired and dressed in dowdy and faded clothes, and she began to lay out the cups.

 

“Four pieces of eight credit, Mrs. Mapleton, for the scraggly looking boy and his two friends.” Noonan poured his few guests cups of the tavern’s own brewed beer, a weak and vile concoction of pisswater Noonan proudly proclaimed to be the house best. “I hear a bit of the old country in you, but you don’t look navy to me. Where do you hail from?”

 

Vane began to say it wasn’t any of Noonan’s fucking business, but Jack cut him off as though he read the words on his mind, “We stand before you as men of the sea and are beholden to no king lest they pay us for the privilege.”

 

Noonan laughed at that, “Good lads, good lads,”

 

Vane sat back, openly disappointed for there was something about Noonan’s face that just seemed to beg for a fist in it. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw the old woman tottering up the stairs with a giddy sort of excitement.

 

The first round of men begun to land from the _Fancy_. The few men that remained on the Island, those pirates from the shore camps, at first stayed back, taking to tables far from the roaring and laughing crew of the _Fancy_. But slowly as the night wore on the drink ran free, they began making their way closer. Soon stories were being exchanged, the older generation regaling them with stories of glorious battles of war being waged at sea, and the younger generation responding with stories of dashing exploits made against French mercantile ships. Their laughter and song seemed to draw every last inhabitant left on Nassau, so that the abandoned Tavern now grew thick with crowds and chatter.

 

Tables had been hastily shoved together to make way for games and the air bounced with the hoots and hollers, threats and taunts of games of cards and dice. It was the old fishermen of Nassau, Vane noted, who seemed to have a stubborn intent that the tavern should not fall to silence for one second. The old men had that driven determination particular to those who felt their doom and end sure to be near. If they believed Nassau’s end to be nigh, they had now set themselves on enjoying their last moments on the capital to the fullest.

 

Vane took a swig of the Kill-Devil and still the gratifying burn did little for his nerves.

 

“Something’s not right. I can feel it.”

 

Jack sighed, “Oh not this again!”

 

Bonny groaned, “Tell your friend that if he talks about Jennings or Hornigold or invisible little girls one more—“

 

Jack lay his hand on Bonny’s arm, giving a gentle squeeze to cut her off. Vane turned slowly at the implied threat. Bonny tried to meet his gaze then but found that for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to do it, and settled instead with a disgusted scoff and a swig of her flagon.

 

“Charles,” Jack’s voice had gone low, and here Vane looked more intently, for only Jack ever used his given name, and only so when he felt something of grave importance needed to be said, “If ever you should be there when Jennings and Hornigold face each other again, it would be advisable for you to keep out of it.”

 

“You wish me to stand there and simply let my First Mate be insulted?”

 

Jack downed his drink and slammed his mug with a satisfied note. He gestured to the Noonan for more, “Their fight is an old one, and it’s not any of our fucking business.”

 

Vane shrugged with a lazy roll of his shoulders, “If their fight is old then I should think it’d high time they move on from it. I have no patience for the quarrels of old men, but I will not have one of my brothers insulted, and neither should you.”

 

“It’s not so easy as that. It’s a very personal feud.”

 

“I don’t care.”

 

“It’s a matter of honour.” Jack went on, ignoring Vane’s sentiment altogether.

 

Vane gestured to Noonan who was at present occupying himself by the dual tasks of taking up space and sweating profusely. “Scotch,”

 

“Scotch, you say?” The man wheezed a laugh, “You’ll have to get past the blockade for that. We’ve no Scotch about us, haven’t for about a year now.”

 

“What, then, do you have about you?” Vane’s patience grew thin.

 

“Rum,” The barkeep replied.

 

Vane smiled though it looked more like a snarl, “Then Rum it fucking is.”

 

Noonan brought out a bottle of the stuff then and this he poured into three cannisters of beaten iron.

 

“Once, long before the _Fancy_ …” Jack began with a grave tone of importance.

 

Vane reached over the table and grabbed Noonan by the arm before Jack could start his story. “Leave the fucking bottle.” Noonan stared at the hard grip on his arm and quickly complied, scuttling away.

 

“Jennings and Hornigold had been a privateers together…” Jack continued.

 

Vane and Anne both groaned and downed their cups and quickly set about refilling them.

 

Jack made a point of ignoring them. By god, they were bound by bar-stool law to sit there and fucking listen to his story so fucking listen they would. “There were two men by the names of Bellamy and Williams who double crossed Jennings, and stole the loot from his ship in the dead of the night. It was everything Jennings had to his name. Rumour has it he went to Hornigold in good faith, believing him to be his friend and a man of honour, and asked for his help in locating the whereabouts of his stolen treasure. Hornigold swore he had no information as to the whereabouts of the men or the loot. Jennings was never able to track down the thieves, his business was destroyed and he was forced to return to England. It was only long after he’d taken his post aboard the _Fancy_ that he learned the truth of what happened—Bellamy and Williams had offered Hornigold a share of the profits if he were to give them shelter from Jennings, and Hornigold had obliged.”

 

“Amen,” Vane raised his glass and this he downed.

 

Here, Jack’s face darkened, “Don’t you get it? Hornigold is not a man to be trusted.”

“Hornigold is no business of mine. Should he act against my first mate, then it will be my business.”

 

Jack sat back, blocked before he could have the opportunity to engage in another tale of friendship and betrayal.

 

“Well enough of this talk.” A grin full of mischief began to spread across Jack’s face. A plan began to formulate in his head on how to pay Vane back his supportive kindness, “Why, I’ve had enough of old, decrepit and sagging old men—“ here he turned to the men from the camps at the shore, “—no offense to you fine gentlemen, ofcourse.”

 

“Why should we take offense?” A voice called out.

 

Jack smiled but his face was tight and his eyes wide, like a fox that suddenly found it had nowhere to run, “—No reason at all, no reason at all. Maybe you will join us then, for this is a very momentous occasion! Gentlemen, we have a friend here who has yet to partake of the forbidden fruit!”

 

Vane felt a strange sensation between his shoulders, and along with it he felt the growing urge to kill.

 

He glared up at Jack, but Jack only smiled in turn. “Who among you will help us find a lovely young lady who will introduce my dear friend to the soft mysteries of the opposite sex?

 

“What the fuck is he on about?” Someone called out from the other end of the tavern.

 

“I just heard sex. Is he going on about sex?” Another voice responded.

 

Jack sighed, and not for the first time did he feel the heavy burden of his own intelligence weighing down heavily upon him. It’s great depths were made all the more stunning in its contrast against the proverbial pisspond of the mental prowess of his chosen company, “Women.” He sighed, “I am talking about women.”

 

“Well why didn’t you just fucking say so?”

 

“Don’t you even think about it.” Vane growled under his breath to Jack.

 

Feeling acutely aware that his prose would be lost on his present audience, Jack chose to use a language more fitting to his current surroundings. He flung his arm around Vane’s shoulders and drew him closer, “Gentlemen, my friend here has never fucked anything in his life!”

 

“Remove your arm or lose your arm.” This Vane said with no particular inflection nor emotion, just the dry matter-of-fact of absolute truth.

 

Jack laughed, and only Vane and Anne could see the nervousness in his eyes, “Figure I might as well go out on my terms.”

                                                                                                                   

Vane sighed, and turned the bottle upside down, “Is there nothing you can do about this?”

 

Anne scoffed, “Don’t you think I’ve tried? It only seems to make him worse.”

 

“Well here’s a fine turn of events!” Jack gasped, “My best friend and the darling love of my life and here you two are conspiring against me!”

 

Vane and Anne turned and each fixed a glare on Jack so fierce it was a wonder the boy didn’t burst into flames.

 

“Your best what?”

 

“Your darling what?”

 

It was Noonan who saved Jack when he asked, “I don’t know what I can do ‘bout your tall scraggly fellow, but if it’s pussy you want, you’ve come to the right place.”

 

Noonan turned before Vane could object, and released a shrill whistle, “Oy, Mapleton! Get the girls down ‘ere!”

 

There was a commotion in the creaky wooden decks overhead, and Mrs. Mapleton, strutting like a drill instructor, lead behind her a line of women in all manners of undress. The tavern roared in a riot of hoots and howls as some women posed over the rails and others began to descend the rickety wooden stairs.

 

They fell upon the tavern like a rising flood until soon every table could boast two new attendants, laughing and drinking, fawning and flattering their way into that night’s wages.

 

Anne rolled her eyes and Vane rubbed at his eyes in exasperation.

 

Jack clapped his friend on the back. “Must you look so dour at this of all times?”

 

Vane stared at his drink with moody contemplation. A woman behind him laughed, high and shrill, and in his mind the sound turned to the shrieks and cries of the women aboard the Sawai. Vane gulped down the entire contents of his glass and refilled it. “Must I be excited at the notion of taking something to bed that sound scream for fear or cry until my ears are fit to bleed?”

 

“A pirate ship is hardly the metric by which to judge all encounters with the fairer sex.”

 

This Vane could acquiesce, for after all, the sum total of his knowledge of women had come from the decks of a pirate ship. Either way, as far as he knew, women were either half fish and fucked a man to drown him, or they fucked a man and cried about it. Neither sounded particularly appealing. Indeed, it could be said that Bonny proved to the exception, but for all he knew she could damn well be part fish under all those clothes and he didn’t particularly care to check.

 

Vane could feel how Jack was taking his silence to be hesitation, like a cloud of growing smugness gathering over the loudmouth horizon. This Vane decided to put a stop to at once. “And the effects thereof? I saw how the men became after they’d fucked aboard the Sawai for three days. Three days between the legs of women and riotous men became meek and mutinous leaders became as content as overfed housecats.”

 

Jack laughed and leaned back, “And you would rather remain your normal dour and angry self?”

 

“Has it ever occurred to you that I might happen to like angry and enjoy dour?”

 

“The Sawai was different. Not all women must be as they were, you know. Unwilling. Why, look at me and Anne!”

 

Jack nearly fell off the stool when a sharp elbow was driven under his ribs with no small amount of force. Anne didn’t respond, for she took Jack’s desperate gasps for air to mean that he had understood her message quite clearly.

 

Vane smiled into his drink, “If one fuck should turn me into half the besotted fool you become around Bonny, I would much prefer to have none of it and be spared the indignity.”

 

“You’re, what, fourteen years old now and you still haven’t taken a woman to bed?” Jack said between hungry gulps of air.

 

“Sixteen,” Vane growled from behind clenched teeth.

 

“That’s even worse!” Jack stared at him, “Sixteen? …You are _really_ short.”

 

“Bonny, elbow him again.”

 

Anne didn’t bother to question him, for this she took as an invitation more than a command. She obliged Vane only too willingly and plunged her elbow onto the same spot she’d hit earlier, and this time Jack fell to the ground in a crumbled ball of long limbs.

 

“Why, my love?” Came a whimper from the ground. Anne shrugged and Vane called for another bottle to be left at the table.

 

It was just as Vane was feeling confident that they’d managed to get rid of Noonan that his cohort came about, the old woman by the name of Mrs. Mapleton. She put a hand gently on Vane’s shoulder and instantly he went rigid. He turned to her slowly and Mrs. Mapleton instantly withdrew the offending hand. “Do you see anything you like?” She drawled, gesturing to the women who were snaking their way around the tables.

 

Vane looked at his drink with disinterest, “No.”

 

“He’s having a hard time deciding.”

 

Mrs. Mapleton looked down to the floor to the source of this mysterious voice, and there she found Rackham, still curled into a ball and holding his ribs.

 

Vane looked down at him and glared. Jack met his glare and smiled, “See, my charming lady, this is his _first time_.” Jack’s grinned broadened, for he had known enough brothel mistresses to know just how to talk to them, “and, you see, he is somewhat _shy_.”

 

Mrs. Mapleton gave a high, sharp cry, “Oh, Poor _lamb_!”

 

Vane slammed down his cup. That’s it, he thought.

 

Now Jack dies.

 

But before he could reach down and yank Rackham by the throat, they were on him, the old lady and several of her minions, having been summoned from what he could only imagine was some unseen dimension of perfumes and silks. High voices and singsong voices, coos and purrs formed by his side, and next thing he knew, Vane was being lead out towards the centre of the atrium.

 

He looked over his should to where the crumpled heap of Rackham sent him a thumbs up. And, god help him, he even caught Anne giving him a smirk.

 

“No need to be gentle with him, ladies!” Jack called out.

 

Yes, Vane thought in a tangle of silks and perfumes and coiffed hair. Going to kill him. Definitely, definitely going to kill him.

 

 

***

 

Vane came to in a pounding of his head that seemed to make the entire world around him hazy. He was aware of the warmth of other bodies around his, of the smell of perfume and alcohol, the silent sounds of sleep and the first call of birds outside. His limbs ached as they did only after a fight, and so too did his heart hammer within his chest in a manner it had only done so after a night of good fighting.

 

His first thought was how strange it was that in the taking of a woman there had lain the same thrill and rush he’d only felt at the killing of a man. How the torment of desire unfulfilled echoed so the torment of a battle where the enemy still stood unvanquished. How victory in a woman’s arms came as did the taking of another life, in a powerful and dizzying rush where you knew that for one fleeting moment another being was wholly and fully yours. It was the same contained madness, the same single-minded clarity.

 

And yet how new and strange and intoxicating it had all been. Never before had he seen such a sight, felt such a thrill, as when the women had moaned and given into him, how they turned meek and docile upon beholding him, how then when they cooed and sighed it was not in derision but in that musical plea for him. One by one they had given before him, and, so sated, they curled at his side and slept contentedly.

 

His only regret came then when exhaustion finally claimed the better of him deep into the night and he was yanked from the pleasures of the bed and plunged into the same waking and fretful sleep that he’d known since first he was loaded onto a ship.

 

Some of the women were gone now, and others still lay curled up around him, tightly wound in the cheap silken bedsheets.

 

The world came to a slow focus, and beyond the pounding of his head, Vane had the distinct impression of being watched. At this, his mind jumped to attention, and his sight sharpened. He looked about the room but saw only made up faces snoring silently.

 

And then it was that, just as the night previous when he and the men had made their way up the hill to the fort, that Vane caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye. His head swung towards the small window then.

 

One of the panels of shutters was missing. From here, a pair of eyes as blue as the water surf stared at him. They met his gaze from beneath a pale forehead fringed with ashe blonde hair. At first he stood his ground, wondering if this were a hallucination as the previous afternoon. But the resemblance was too uncanny. He glared at a figure mostly hidden from him by a plaster wall, and he saw then those blue eyes crinkle and he knew the girl was smiling, with that same mocking light they’d had on the shore.

 

Now he had her.

 

Vane leapt to his feet.

 

What Vane had forgotten was the pair of breeches still firmly around his ankles.

 

So his lithe leap was only met by an equally catastrophic fall as his legs tangled and he tipped over face-first against the floor.

 

All around him there were high pitched screeches and yells of protestations. He looked up from the floor amidst the chaos, and those blue eyes peered down at him and he could hear as well as see the creature laughing.

 

He held the mysterious girl’s impertinent gaze as he got to his feet and gathered his breeches around him, utterly oblivious to the women running and covering themselves around him. As he finally successfully leapt to his feet he saw her dash away from the window in a swirl of glowing hair and a peal of laughter. He made for the door then, ignoring the whines and protests of the women behind him. Vane reached the doorway just in time to see a flurry of light gold disappearing down the stairs, leaving behind only the sound of laughter being carried in the wind.

 

***

 

Eleanor practically flew down the stairs, dodging unconscious bodies on the landing and ducking her way past men who were barely able to stand upright. She saw Mrs. Mapleton rise like an angry, disapproving wall before her, the old woman’s hands at her hips, her legs apart so that her skirts billowed around her like a dam. Eleanor laughed and didn’t break her stride, she dove under Mapleton’s skirts with enough speed to dash right on through her. She kept running and she could hear Mapleton yammering in the background, and this only caused her to laugh harder.

 

Eleanor was breathless by the time she caught up with Max in a nearby alleyway. Max greeted her with that familiar kind and friendly smile, but Eleanor hooked their arms together and half dragged them at a galloping pace towards the hills.

 

“What has gotten into you?” Eleanor heard Max call from a few steps behind her,

 

“I think I may have made one of them mad!” Eleanor laughed.

 

“Eleanor!”

 

“My my, Mr. Scott!” Eleanor called over her shoulder, “How far you’ve managed to throw your voice!”

 

Max laughed, “Which one was it?”

 

“The angry, scowly looking one!” Eleanor called back with a hint of pride in her voice.

 

But Max only shook her head, her friend’s energy contagious, and she joined in her laughter. In the back of her mind Max knew this could not bode well for the immediate future, but so long as she was around Eleanor, she found she had a difficult time caring about anything else. Her small hand clutched at Eleanor’s with an unrelenting grip.

 

By the time the girls reached the manor they were both panting and out of breath. They hid in the shadow of the doorway as though they’d been chased, and only then did they double over to catch their breath, still laughing among themselves.

 

“You are utterly mad, you know that?”

 

“I didn’t like—“ Eleanor panted, her face bright and smiling from ear to ear, “—The tone of his look.”

 

“That—“ Max panted, “—Is not even a thing.”

 

“You’d know it is if you’d seen it.” Eleanor took in one last gulp of air and leaned her back against the wall, “That boy had a definite look with a definite tone.”

 

“And what about it so offended you that you decided him worthy of torment?”

 

“It was haughty. He looked at me in a haughty tone of voice. I don’t know, a haughty manner. But there was a definite tone, and it was definitely haughty!”

 

Max burst out laughing, “That’s _it_?”

 

“You’ve got to put a stop to that kind of thing early, you know! I tell you, I have half a mind to just keep on tormenting him well until he—“

 

“Eleanor.”

 

The voice came from somewhere in the upstairs, and its effect was immediate. Max watched, horrified, as the colour drained from Eleanor’s face.

 

Mr. Scott stood at the doorway. Max noted an apprehension about him, a deep sadness, the likes of which she had never seen on the one adult who could survive the tempers of Eleanor Guthrie.

 

And then, just as quickly, the colour came rushing back to Eleanor’s face. A dark look unlike anything Max had ever seen came about Eleanor’s face with the violence of a storm.

 

“It is time, now.”

 

***

 

Richard Guthrie had not been particularly glad to hear of Captain Avery-- or how was it he was calling himself now? Ah, yes. Captain _'Bridgeman’s_ \-- plans, for visits to Nassau implied a tedious and nervous day with challenges Richard did not particularly wish to face.

 

For one, he found no appeal whatsoever in the rotten little outpost and he always went out of his way to try and find ways avoid Nassau’s muddy and shit infested streets at any costs. There had only ever one thing he’d found beautiful in Nassau, and that now lay at the north end of the Island, six feet under a Puritan cemetery that he could never bring himself to visit.

 

And then there was that second matter. The matter of the child.

 

Richard sighed and rubbed his eyes, and he the carriage seemed to grow all the more claustrophobic around him. The child must be growing now, and it soon should be of a marriageable age. This he knew only for the oncoming occasion had heralded the first time he had heard word from his father since his wife’s death. The message he received was in his father’s characteristic short and terse terms, wasting no time with the pleasantries of family communication nor asking to his health or wellbeing, but instead being concerned only to the matter of his daughter’s age and the troublesome issue of a dowry. There were already mentions of alliances that needed to be made and allies whose supported needed enforcing through the yokes and chains of matrimonial bliss, but Richard brushed these away and did not bother to finish the correspondence, he had enough on his mind to worry about wedding bells.

 

How long had it been when last he’d laid eyes upon his daughter? He’d done his best to put off having to see her, but his father’s insistence, and Avery’s coming arrival, proved Richard could no longer put this meeting off. He sighed and laid his head back, the unpaved roads beneath the wheels causing his head to roll and slam against the back of the carriage. Suppose the time had come, then, that he should take the child to New Harbour Island so that he may begin to oversee the preparations needed for her life ahead. Already the prospect seemed daunting and tiresome. Before he should leave Nassau he would have to send word to the servants to clear out his gallery to make room for her, for he was always in need of his guest rooms and he didn’t think the child would need that much room. And then there was the matter of a tutor, ofcouse. Mr. Scott had been a fine choice for primary education, but he’d be of no use on the educations of a lady. Suppose he fancied to find a Frenchwoman, maybe, that could teach his child those things essential for a new bride, things like the mending of clothes and art of fine conversation and the baking of bread and… Whatever the hell it was a woman needed teaching.

 

Soon the driver called out to him, and Richard saw ahead that ghostly figure of the building he’d once called home. His heart sank in his chest at the sight of it, not for what the decaying building was, but for what it had been.

 

The image of a delimitated house gave way in flickers from the past. Where an empty and stripped porch stood he saw white wooden rails that still smelled of fresh paint, the hanging flowerpots thick with the red begonias that had been his wife’s pride.

 

_And there he saw her, the dappled light of the trees shining on her skin like the facets of a diamond. She’d worn her green muslin dress, his favourite for the way it made her eyes seemed to glow. Her platinum blonde hair had been done up as was proper of a married matron, and was held in place by a jade comb he’d had brought from the East especially for her. As Richard approached the manor he could see where tiny hands had been yanking at tugging at those golden locks so that her hair fell in disheveled curls about her face in a way that only seemed to make her appear all the more radiant._

_He’d slowed his steps, quiet as he could. She had not seen him, and was humming absently as she saw to her garden. He’d thought to surprise her, to sneak up on her as a small boy and swoop her into his arms. But she’d been quicker. She turned as he stepped forward, and her green eyes sparkled when they beheld him and Richard found that he could not move from where he stood, ensnared as he was by this radiant creature that stood in front of him._

_She smiled a smile she reserved for him and him only, and her skirts rustled with the fresh sea breeze, and then they rustled more. His wife’s beautiful face broke into a rich melodious laugh as a small figure bounded out from behind her. A little pink ball waddled out from behind his wife’s skirts with small chubby arms outstretched to keep her balance._

_“There are my girls!”_

_Richard sank to his knees and spread out his arms. His daughter’s big, blue eyes grew wide with adoration. That small and pretty face beamed with excitement at the sight of her father and she barreled towards him, her perfect golden curls bouncing about her as she waddled in that clumsy gait._

_“Papa!”_

“—rie. Mr. Guthrie!”

 

Richard snapped out of his dream with a start and found the sunburned and unpleasant face of his carriage driver peering at him from the window.

 

“Is you alright, sir?”

 

“Yes, yes,” Richard grumbled. No, his mind recoiled, disgusted at himself for falling into the exact trap he’d hoped to avoid. No, he was not alright. He wouldn’t be alright until he’d met Avery and managed the business of his daughter’s reconciliation so he could pack his things and clear out of this wretched little Island.

 

***

 

Richard stood in the room that had once served as his sitting room. It was bereft of furniture now, and he saw nothing of himself in the room, only a few mold ridden boxes draped with dusty white blankets. Some of the windows here had been boarded up so that the room had about it a strange and decidedly stagnant air. Streams of sunlight still sought those cracks and gaps in the covered windows so that the room had the look of perpetual twilight.

 

The door opened, and Mr. Scott lead the girl in.

 

He could tell that as little as he wanted to be there, she wanted to stand before him even less. Strangely enough, this thought bothered him and he did not seek to wonder why.

 

He never seemed quite at ease with the child, and this fact emanated from every pore of his being. His father had often admonished him the way one could always read his moods -- his sensitive inclination as his mother had called them —his father, in turn, called them his womanish tendencies.

 

He saw him there, now. His father’s hard and disapproving expression stared out at him from his own daughter’s face. He saw in that face no trace of his own self, nor the ghost of his tender hearted wife. He saw there only the raw contempt and disapproval he’d thought left behind in Boston.

 

Some sense of indignity swelled up inside him, and any notion of reconciliation was quickly banished from his mind. There was to be no reunion to welcome him here, and now, his mood spoiled, he wanted nothing more than to be done with this insipid trip and return to the comfort and safety of his own home.

 

“What are you doing here?”

 

“Eleanor!” Mr. Scott growled.

 

But she did not turn to Mr. Scott. Richard looked to his once manservant with a trained mask of bored disconnection, “Is this how you’ve raised my daughter, Mr. Scott?”

 

“How dare you!” Eleanor cried, “Is that how you speak to the man who raised your burden?”

 

“Eleanor—“ Mr. Scott started again, but Richard cut him off.

 

“If this is how you wish to greet me then this meeting is over until you have learned some manners. Out of my sight!” He snapped.

 

“You have no right to order me!”

 

“I am your father and you will do as I say!” He said, and somewhere he heard the echo of his own father’s voice.

 

But he was not his father, and Eleanor was not him. She did not cower before him, she did not grow weak and run. She stuck her chin out at him and stood her ground, so utterly unlike he’d been at her age.

 

“You are my father as worm is father to a cat! You dare take your tones on Mr. Scott, when he has been more my father than you could ever hope to be!”

 

“You watch your tone with me, or so help me I’ll—“

 

“You’ll what? Strip me of my home? Of the clothes my mother bought me, of the food we grow out back?

 

”Insolent-- Had I spoken to my father thus he would have had me whipped!”

 

“For all the good it did him, for look at what it created!”

 

The last vestiges of Richard’s disaffected airs gave way then and he leapt to his feet, “You watch your tone, for you grow hysterical! So help me, were you not a girl and but a son, you would never dare to speak to me in such a way!”

 

“And so help me were you not a coward but a father you would not have run away to your home on Craven Island!”

 

“Eleanor!” Mr. Scott’s voice broke through to her. In one hesitation Eleanor saw the way her father’s eyes flashed when Mr. Scott’s words reached her where his could not. Eleanor knew an opportunity when she saw one.

 

“I’m sorry--” she said, though she never took her eyes off her father, “--Mr. Scott, if I have caused you offence.”

 

Eleanor dropped the same mocking curtsey she had used on Mrs. Mapleton, “Father,” she hissed, and excused herself out of the room.

 

There was a long and awkward silence.

 

“I ask you to pardon her temperament, Mr. Guthrie. Times got hard after the last hurricane tore up the crops from here to New Adelaide. It is a lot of burdens for such a young girl to carry.”

 

“Yes, yes, yes. I don’t need you to lecture me on the precariousness of our times, Mr. Scott.” Richard snapped, his mood turned irritable, “It’s not as though I’m living in some large plantation in Massachusetts, we have our hardships on harbour Island just as you do here.”

 

Hardships more easily endured in the comfort of a mansion and company of servants, Mr. Scott thought, and instantly he regretted it, for some part of him still believed himself indebted to this man.

 

“See to it that the girl is presentable while I am in town, at least. I would not have myself made to look like a negligent father.” Richard said, and he looked with open disgust at the shadowy and empty manor, with all its open spaces, with all its ghosts. “Let’s see about getting ourselves a drink, shall we? I find the atmosphere here does grow most stifling.”

 

“Mr. Guthrie, I do beg your pardon if I sound impertinent, but I do wonder—what do you mean, make the girl presentable?”

 

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You know, make her look—“ He gestured vaguely with his hands, “--like a proper girl. Have her put on her a dress that isn’t in tatters, at least.”

 

“Mr. Guthrie—“ and here Mr. Scott searched carefully for the words, “—The clothes she wears are among the only ones she owns, of the clothes she owns she is now wearing her finest upon her back..”

 

Richard stared at Mr. Scott in silence.

 

Mr. Scott tried again, “The only dresses she owns were the ones—the ones your late wife bought for her—“

 

“Yes,” Richard waved his hand in that droll way, “I do believe she mentioned something about that in the throes of her hysterics,”

 

Mr. Scott went on, “Well, yes, and I—I have sent you many letters informing you of this, asking if you could send—“

 

“—I must not have gotten them.“

 

Mr. Scott took a deep and silent breath, but even his patience, now grown accustomed to trials at the hands of Eleanor, was growing strained, “—Letters I sent alongside the trade reports and accounts of business.”

 

Richard’s face grew hot and he turned, gesturing to the outline of an armoire by the bay windows, “What happened here, eh?” He started in a laugh, “Do you remember the old armoire that stood here? What was it we said? I built it myself. Hah!”

 

“Yes, sir, I quite remember.” Mr. Scott said, and his tone grew tired, tired and weary.

 

“That was quite a summer then, wasn’t it?” He chuckled, “Mrs. Guthrie said I had no knack for woodcrafts, and by God, she was right! Remember, you and I would sneak off into the night while she slept, just so she’d never know it was you who built it? Oh, but do you remember how her face lit up when she saw it?” His eyes sparkled in some long, far off memory. “Whatever happened to it?”

 

“It was washed away in the flood six years ago, sir.”

 

“Ah.” And the light seemed to seep out of Richard Guthrie’s eyes then, and he resumed his affected air of disinterest, “Do send me a letter, and I’ll see to it that it gets replaced. “And remind me to send some servants you, and some clothes for the girl.”

 

“Yes, sir.” Mr. Scott said mirthlessly, for his nerves had grown too frayed to indulge Richard Guthrie in promises Mr. Scott knew he would never keep.

 

Richard did not notice this. He could still see Eleanor as she’d stood her ground before him and thrust her chin up, and he was overcome with a sense of disappointment that the energy and strength which he’d wished for all his life had come to be utterly wasted on a daughter where it would have made such an admirable and enviable son.

 

“It was my understanding that you… That you wished to take Eleanor back with you, so that she may live with you.”

 

“That feral little alleycat, in my home! Good God, man. Did you not see the way she stared at me? I’d be worried she would slit my throat in my sleep! Such language! She doesn’t spend any time around the pirate by any chance, does she?

 

Mr. Scott sighed.

 

“No matter. The girl stays here. If you are such a father to her, then let her remain here under your paternal wisdom! I can see that the damage you’ve allowed to fester has already grown too advance to be healed.” Richard levelled Mr. Scott with a withering look, “I will not be needing your company on my meeting today, Mr. Scott. Nor any in the immediate future. I can see now you are not the man I trusted you to be.”

 

***

 

Vane sat cross legged on the sands before Nassau. He could hear the calls and laughs of the pirates behind him, but he only had eyes for the harbour as the _Fancy_ drew nearer. Questions burned in his mind, questions he yearned to put to Avery. What had been in that letter that had made the old man Hornigold smile like a told? There was more to Jennings’ anxiety than an old feud between old fools, this Vane knew for certain.

 

Vane saw the _Fancy_ make anchor and he leapt to his feet. He found the closest boat and practically shoved its present passenger out of it, pushing it back towards the water and leaping in.

 

Men poured out of the _Fancy_ in full boats fit to burst. On seeing them their cheered and hooted and already Vane could tell that Rackham too had been aboard the ship. He’d deal with him later.

 

Vane found Avery in the Captains’ quarters. The Captain had his back to him as he stared at an old map Vane knew to be outdated now some thirty years. The map was filled with small red flags, all the places Avery had gone to in his career.

 

Avery turned on sensing the newcomer’s presence. Once he saw Vane he smiled openly, one of the few people in Vane’s life who had ever reacted to him in such a way.

 

“Ah, there he is!” Avery beamed, walking around the desk, “My god, look at you! Still panting, eh? I heard it was quite the evening for you. My time grows short and my meeting draws near, but I tell you, as soon as I get back, I will have you tell me everything, eh? And don’t you spare me any of the details, now! I’ve had my share of Island women and by God if they can’t still surprise me after all these years!”

 

“Sir, that is not what I wish to speak to you about. “

 

The smile faded from Avery’s face and his eyes darkened with worry, “Sit down, boy.” He gestured towards a chair before his desk and took his own place at the opposite end, “What is the matter?”

 

Vane did not sit down. This only seemed to worry Avery more.

 

“I wish to speak to you of this meeting.”

 

“Ah,” Avery sighed ruefully, “So, you’ve figured it out? Should have known it would be you.” He sighed again and there was resignation in his voice. Still, he managed a weary smile, “Well, best it’s you than that loudmouth Rackham, god knows he’d announce it to the world if he could—“

 

Vane stared at Avery in utter bewilderment, for this was not how he had expected the conversation to go. “Figured what out, sir?”

 

Avery’s eyes went wide. Clearly this was not how he’d imagined the conversation to go, either. “So you hadn’t figured it out?”

 

“I came to warn you that something is not right in that Island. I suspect that Hornigold has had us followed since first we landed.”

 

Avery forced an interested tone in his voice, “Ah. That’s quite an accusation.”

 

But vane stared at him and Avery knew he would not be able to steer the conversation so easily, “Sir. Of what did you speak of earlier?”

 

“Worry not,” Avery waved a hand, "you will find out soon enough.”

 

“Does it concern the meeting we are to attend?”

 

Avery closed his eyes and took a deep breath, “In a way, yes. Yes it does involve a meeting, and I and Jennings will attend it. But that is all.”

 

Vane was taken aback, and the meaning of his Captain’s words hit him like a slap, “You can’t mean---“

 

“You’re a wary lad and I am thankful for that as every man who shall ever serve next to you will be thankful. But you have my word that this is a matter that should not, “his eyes hardened at Vane in a way they never had before, “and _does_ not concern you.”

 

Vane’s voice did not rise, but instead they lowered in a way that seemed to make the whole room crackle like a wildfire, “I cannot stand by and let you and Jennings walk into that meeting unguarded.”

 

Avery laughed at this, “You have not yet met Richard Guthrie, or else you’d know just how little you have to worry about!”

 

“And of the other one? The old man and his spies?”

 

“Old man!” Avery hooted, “Don’t catch Jennings hears you call him that!” His hand waved through the air dismissively, “Hornigold is a sour old trout but the only time he should pose a threat is behind the safeguard of his fort and its cannons. And the only men who still remain loyal to him are aging farmers and arthritic grocers loyal to a king long dead. We have little to fear by way of his spies, as you call them.” His eyed twinkled at Vane, but there was a sadness there that made Vane only grow all the more apprehensive, “Have more faith in your old Captain than that.”

 

“Then there should be no issue letting us come along!”

 

“By God, boy, you try my patience! I will not have you growing insubordinate to me, not at this of all times!”

 

“What times? What is going to happen that we can’t help you—“

 

“You are dismissed.” Avery hissed.

 

“But—“

 

“I said you are dismissed, boy!” Avery roared and jumped to his feet, slamming down his hands on his table with such force that all the instruments there jumped.

 

Vane stared at him and Avery could see the boy’s internal struggle play over his face in utter clarity. Vane opened his mouth to speak but only growled in impotent rage. He stormed out of the room, his footfalls so hard so that the whole room shook on his parting.

 

“Sir,” Vane hissed and slammed the door behind him.

 

Avery sighed and leaned against his desk. Not for the first time he thought that he was getting far too old for this.

 

Avery opened the door and grabbed the first man that he saw, demanding that he be brought Jack Rackham.

 

By the time Jack finally deigned it to show himself, Avery’s mood was every bit as foul as Vane’s.

 

“Rackham! I want you and Vane on the next boat to shore.”

 

Jack stared, utterly bewildered,

 

“But sir, we’re on watch, it’s the other men’s—“

 

“I don’t care, and I don’t care if you have to knock him out and drag him to shore! I want him off this ship! And whatever you do, you are to keep him away from the fort at all times, am I understood?”

 

Rackham stood there, stunned, for the only time he had ever seen his captain rage so was when he was preparing for battle. Jack straightened his back and nodded his head, “Sir.”

 

***

 

Eleanor was well cleared of the manor, and still she found her mood in no better disposition.

 

Everything about this simpering excuse for a man drove her utterly mad. How she despised his flouncing ways, that insipid and droll way with which he spoke, as though he prided himself on sounding perpetually bored. And he would find life boring, too! Life must be very boring indeed were one such a whimpering she-cow as her dandy of a father!

 

That he should hold it against her that she was but a daughter! And she being easily thrice the man he was! You wouldn’t catch her mincing about with some giant wig and enough perfume to make a whore swoon!

 

Eleanor kicked at the red clay impotently. For one moment she was suddenly very aware of the dress she wore, of the ribbon in her hair. And here she felt something indignant rise within her, a stubbon inclination that refused to let her be ashamed of what she wore, what those things represented, if only for the desire to love those things her father hated. If her father hated that she were a girl then let him be constantly reminded of it!

She was thrice the man her father was, and she would become four, five, six times the man he was! Yes, oh, yes she would! And oh, how much better that she should do it in a skirt! Let the world know how the simpering Richard Guthrie was outdone by his own daughter, a ribbon in her hair and a skirt at her waist! Yes, let him know it was the daughter he had, not the son he wished for, that outdid him!

 

And yet no matter how much she exulted in daydreams of victories not yet had, and revenges that waited to be doled out, she still felt an annoying pang in her heart. Some unseen wound that had remained raw and open since the day she’d returned from her mother’s funeral to find the manor empty and her father gone.

 

Eleanor shook her head. This would not do. She quickly chalked the knot in her chest up to bad food and decided that she could best take her mind off said bad food by way of distraction.

 

And what better source of distraction, thought she, than the camps? Yes, she thought with a smug satisfaction. If her father wants her company, let him come look for it in the camps.

 

Eleanor was so caught up in her dark reverie she had not noticed how the air had seemed to still about her, how the birds and insects alike had stopped their song as they did only in the presence of some great and dangerous predator.

 

Still blistering with rage, Eleanor picked at a rock from the floor and hurled it in her fury against a tree. She bent down to do it again but something came up behind her.

 

Eleanor tried to spin around but a strong arm wrapped her by the waist and slammed her back against someone. Her body tensed for a response but before she could fight back she felt the sharp press of a blade at her throat.

 

“Now I have you.”


	7. Chapter 3: Hostis Humani Generis

CHAPTER THREE

HOSTIS HUMANI GENERIS

_April 1 st, 1696_

 

Vane had been sent back to Nassau with Jack the obedient lap dog to serve as his jailor. At first Jack had followed him as closely as a shadow, lost in a stream of chatter. But then he had caught sight of a wisp of red hair gleaming in the wind, and he was gone. The world around Jack disappeared, any orders or duties forgotten as they always were whenever Jack caught sight of Anne Bonny. Vane was left alone at last. But what good would it do him? He had been banished from his ship as an errant child thrown from his father’s house.

 

He had planned to make his way to the centre of the small village by way of a shortcut through a small marshy path that snaked its way through a cluster of mangrove trees. He had been pondering upon the rotten luck that had besieged him since first he stepped foot on New Providence, when Providence itself came to his aid.

 

The path he had taken had led him to a small secluded beach tucked into a small harbour protected by long and jagged cliffs and coves. It would have been as peaceful sight where it not for the high and angry roars that seemed to be emanating from the water. Sand was kicked into the air by booted feet, and Vane saw her then.

 

A wave crashed onto the shore and a gust of wind kicked her golden hair about the wrathful visage of the little girl whom had haunted him, the convenient avatar of all the ill omens and misfortunes that had befallen Vane. His heart had leaped in his chest, finally he had a person on whom he could project his every anger and frustration.

 

The chit had been so content at abusing the shoreline and hurling wrathful oaths at the ocean that she had never seen him coming from behind her.

 

A wave crashed in a roar and he was upon her. On arm wrapped around her waist, the other holding the blade of his sabre to her thin neck.

 

But the girl did not scream as he had expected her to.

 

She went very still in his grasp. She did not squirm nor fight, nor did she burst into seafoam and return to the ocean.

 

They stood there thus, both refusing to give, both refusing to move. Finally, Vane heard it. A small, gentle sound, undiscernible in the wind. He pulled the girl tighter to him and he felt her breath hitch, but still he could not hear what she was saying.

 

The girl was tall for her age, so small of bone and size that she felt as though she may break were he to press her too hard. He leaned his head down closer to her so that he might hear what it was she was trying to say.

 

And then it happened, so fast it came in a blur.

 

The little blonde head swung back and smashed against his face. Vane reeled back, too shocked for the pain to fully hit him. He had no time to realise what had just happened before a sharp elbow lunged into his stomach and knocked the wind from him The impact buckled him and lunged his body forward and his hand went lax at his side, his sabre slipping from his grip and falling to the ground. A small heel drove with force on top of his toes and he tipped forward altogether until the backs of sharp knuckles swung back and smashed against his nose, and Vane felt himself tipping back. Finally, injury met insult when the killing blow came by way of the return of that sharp elbow, not to his stomach, but in a final and brutal assault on his groin.

 

Vane felt the world threaten to give out under him under the sheer assault of pain, but he refused to go down. Through the haze of his pain he could see a little current of white and gold darting away from him.

 

“Damn you women and damn your damned pointy elbows!” He roared.

 

Nothing, it seemed, was going to go as he expected it to.

 

The girl hadn’t fought at first, but she had bested him. And when he opened his eyes he saw her not running for the cover of her father or the safety of the village, but ludicrously enough did he see the dress clad figure scrambling her way up a tree like some sort of giant blonde chipmunk.

 

Vane stared, still half doubled over, in such confusion that his pain went almost forgotten.

 

“What the hell are you doing?”

 

The girl swung herself up a tree and sat on a branch. She met his question with a fierce glare. Small, deft hands began picking at small objects in the tree.

 

Vane growled, for being defeated was one thing. Being defeated in battle was to be expected. But to be _ignored_ \--!

 

He picked his sabre of the ground and slid it in its sheath. In quick strides of long legs, Vane began to make his way to the tree. First she assaults him, now she dared—

 

Something smashed against the middle of Vane’s forehead, stunning him. Vane shook his head and made his way quicker, only for something else to smash against his chest.

 

Vane looked up. The girl’s long legs hung over the branch. In her lap her skirt had been gathered into a nest, and there he saw a collection of baby sweetsops. She wielded the small fruits in each hand as magnificently as a projectile of war.

 

Her small arms began to swing in short, deft strokes and soon Vane had to cross his arms over his head to protect his face from the hail of produce.

 

“Stop hitting me with fruit, damn you!” He growled from under his arms.

 

“Stop coming after me!” Shrieked the angry little voice.

 

“No!”

 

A full sized sweetsop nailed him between the eyes.

 

Pissed off, bruised, aching, and now covered in fruit, Vane decided he was going to put an end to this and began closing the distance between himself and the tree.

 

“Who hits with fruit? Who does that?” He yelled in honest confusion, his hands finding steady hold on the trunk of the tree.

 

That pale face glared at him from over a sharp little nose, “You think you’re the first idiot to give chase? Hardly! You are, however, the first one stupid enough to do it while sober. I will have you hanged for your impertinence!”

 

Eleanor watched as the strange boy made quick and unusually efficient work of climbing up the trunk of the tree. Indeed, he was the first sailor who had been so stupid so as to give chase to the daughter of Richard Guthrie, at least while sober. Drunk sailors made for bad tree climbers, but sober ones, however, seemed to lack the handicap. Eleanor worried at her lip. It was too far to her to jump down. She looked up, the dappled green sunlight hitting her eyes. The only escape was—

She gasped when the figure that had just a second ago been feet beneath her suddenly appeared, crouched like a panther between herself and the main trunk of the tree. Eleanor tried to move back but the branch swayed unsteadily. The boy smirked with an animal viciousness, and the look highlighted the strange barbaric air to him with him wild untamed hair, his features and cheekbones as large as a predator of the jungle. There was a dangerous light in his eyes and when he smiled she halfway expected to see the large canines of a wolf.

 

“You presume you’d live long enough to see that come about.”

 

Eleanor set her lips in a firm and angry line and refused to be afraid. If she couldn’t go down, then she wouldn’t go down. She pushed to her feet and grabbed at the nearest branch up. Her small arms strained against the weight and pull of her body as she tried to pull herself up.

Vane watched as _again_ the girl completely and selfishly refused to act like she was supposed to. He watched her try to pull herself up to another branch. His mind reeled. What in the hell did she think she was doing? Who ran away by trying to go up a tree? _Where was she even hoping to go_?

 

The girl was either entirely mad or completely stupid, he thought.

 

“Alright, this ends now.” He reached out and grabbed a slim ankle clad in thin stockings.

 

“This ends,” Came the high voice from above, “When I say it ends!” The foot in his hand started struggling in his grasp with such force that he was momentarily caught off balance and Vane had to swing back to steady himself against the mother trunk of the tree.

 

He growled and made to grab her other foot but it swung out of his grasp.

 

And then it swung back.

 

Vane dodged just in time for the foot to miss his head, the jerking movement of his body causing the fragile branch to swing violently under him. Her bound leg coiled and kicked and coiled and bucked and swung and twisted in his grasp. He caught a glimpse of her face looking at him from over her shoulder. Her heel made straight for his chin. “Goddamnit, stop kicking me!”

 

The small booted foot swung at his head again, “Cut that out—“ A well-worn heel smashed against his forehead and Vane growled, his hand snapping at an ankle that never seemed to stay in one place for too long but grabbing only thin air.

 

The girl called out to him, “Stop trying to look up my skirt!”

 

 _“What?”_ In his shock and outrage, the harsh and well-practiced tones of the dreaded pirate gave way to reveal the high and youthful shriek of a boy of sixteen. “I’m not interested in looking up your fucking skirt you little—“ Vane was cut off when a small booted foot suddenly swung awkwardly towards his face.

 

The girl was small but kicked like a gazelle and he had to dodge this way and that. It was when he just barely managed to dodge a well-aimed kick to his forehead that the tree itself began to sway as a catapult. Vane’s breath came to a stop and he was all too suddenly aware of the distance that stretched between him and the sand below, “You’re going to get us both—“

 

There was a crack, a sound as high and powerful as the snap of lightning.

 

Both children stopped.

 

The children slowly, carefully looked at each other.

 

They both sighed in relief.

  
The air snapped again.

 

Vane felt the branch under his feet, thin but steady. There was a crack from above him. A crack from beneath him.

 

And then there was nothing beneath his feet.

 

They were falling both, Vane’s hand still on that small ankle. Even in his fall he refused to let go. For his efforts, he was rewarded with the impact of the soft sand at his back and the solid impact of the hard little body slamming on top of him and knocking the air from his lungs. His head rolled back and he bared his teeth in pain. The girl on top of him hesitated as she tried to get her wits to her.

 

It was his only chance.

 

He grabbed her by the shoulders, swung her around and pinned her to the sand. Now he would see the face of his tormentor.

 

The ocean crashed behind them.

 

Eleanor opened her eyes and stared up at the boy. Though pinned she refused to show fear.

 

But the boy only stared down at her, dumbfounded.

 

He stared at her in a strange way Eleanor smugly took to be admiration and longing, for the men of the camps had always made such a great fuss over her that she had long developed quite a high opinion of herself. She was basking in her triumph, expecting that the brute should apologise at any moment for his brutish ways, beg her forgiveness for he had mistaken her to be some errant wharf child and not her noble mother’s fair-haired daughter who was once groomed for court,

 

“You’re—“ He started. Eleanor basked, her ego contently preparing for a torrent of apologies and compliments. The boy gasped, “—You’re just some dumb kid!”

 

Neither she nor her ego had been expecting that.

 

Blood rushed to Eleanor’s face in righteous fury, “So are you!”

 

“I am a man of sixteen years!”

 

“Sixteen?” She stopped, all indignation stripped from her face and replaced with an open curiosity, “…Did you shrink in the water or are you just naturally that short?”

 

Blood rushed to the boy’s face as surely as it had hers, “What did you just—“

 

In one moment, he had been distracted. She wrenched her shoulder from under his hand, reached for his ear and yanked as hard as she could. The boy yelped and she grabbed for his hair, yanking him down to the sand beside her.

 

The girl tried to have him on his back, but Vane refused to give. It would be she who would lose this, not him. And yet still, the more he fought, the more she retaliated. Lost in a tussle of limbs and sand and skirts and the roar of the ocean, he could not believe this creature to be of the same species as the women he’d taken to bed the night before, much less could he imagine her to be of the same gender. There was nothing by way of a feminine softness to her—she was all hard angles, pointy elbows and sharp knees. She didn’t fight as was proper and she certainly didn’t fight with any honour. She didn’t fight like a woman, hell, she didn’t fight like a person—she fought like a hellcat, all teeth and nails, pulling and scratching and biting and snapping like a wild animal.

 

Somewhere in the skirmish, Charles had stopped being the dread pirate of the Pirate King’s crew, well-trained in the arts of fighting and killing, and had instead become a sixteen-year-old boy who was simply trying to keep from getting elbowed in the groin for a second time.

 

She jabbed at his eyes and he yanked at her hair, she snapped at him and he pinned her to the ground. She squirmed and bucked and kicked with a downright inhuman reserve of energy. He growled and turned her over, shoving her cheek against the sand and pinning her arm against her back. A red hot coil of wrath and hate tugged at his heart. This girl in her fine clothes and noblewoman’s arrogance had shown him none of the deference he had grown accustomed to—the deference he had earned. She hadn’t bowed her head meekly or darted out of his way for fear as the women of Port Elizabeth had, no, she had toyed with him and laughed at him and even gone so far as to issue him orders and threats as though he were still that little street boy to be stepped over and laughed at. If she thought she could bark her orders and use him at her whim, she was sorely mistaken. That she would dare underestimate him! That was an offense he would make sure she would not repeat.

 

She slammed her head back as she’d earlier done, but this time he was ready for her tricks and dodged in time.

 

He had her pinned, helpless beneath him.

 

But he did not go for his musket. It wasn’t blood he lusted for, but something else altogether. When the girl had nearly bested him again, he’d evaded her move. She let out a curse in her brief defeat and at his triumph, Vane let out a strangely childish “Hah!”

The world spun around Eleanor in a blur and next thing she knew she was at her back, her arm pinned behind her, the cold press of a blade against her neck.

 

She was out of tricks, and he knew it. She could see it in his face, the sharp angles of his cheekbones and jaw made to look all the more brutal by the cold fire in his eyes and the cruel smirk at his lips. Eleanor saw the victory in his eyes, the smug light there, and it filled her with a cold fury. His look challenged her spirit and brought her strength back thrice fold in a cold surge of utter dislike.

 

Vane’s hand didn’t move from his blade. He could feel the flesh begin to give, but he would not let go. This time, he was at an advantage. There was no room for her to retaliate, no room for her to escape. Things were going to go his way now.

 

And yet even as she lay there trapped beneath him, her blood pounding just millimetres from his sabre, she stared at him with a cool and burning contempt. Her eyes bore into him as though even then she were thinking of how it was she would kill him.

 

“If you want to live, then beg me to spare your life,” He growled, smiling wickedly, “Say ‘I beg you, please let me live,’ and I may yet think about it.”

 

He felt a tremble go through the girl, and he liked to think that finally the girl was coming to fear him.

 

She looked away and worried at her lip.

 

“Well, I—I—“ She gulped, squeezing her eyes shut. “P-Please…”

 

She turned towards him again, her eyes lowered.

 

Vane felt the thrill of triumph, but it was short lived.

 

When her eyes met his they were unchanged, still arrogant and cold and fiercely defiant.

 

He’d never felt her hand slip from under her back until it was too late.

 

Eleanor tore her hand out from under her, grabbed a fist of sand and hurled it into his eyes.

 

Vane swung back, his eyes clenching shut against the sting of salt and coarse sand in his eyes.

 

Eleanor took the opportunity to turn back around to face him, she planted her hands on his broad shoulders and shoved him over, planting her weight on top of him.

 

“If you want to kill me, then just kill me! But don’t fuck with me!” She yelled.

 

Vane stared up at her in shocked silence. For one moment, the girl’s outburst had shocked him. Everything the girl had done had taken him by surprise, but never had anyone responded to him like this, much less when he had had their life in his hands. He’d seen grown men beg and he’d seen grown men bow their heads to meet their ends with silent dignity. He had seen a man piss himself in fear and he had seen a man outright faint. He had never, however, had someone accuse him of fucking with them just as he was about to slice through their throat.

 

Vane might have admired the girl, had not the realisation that he - a man full grown by his standards, was being currently pinned by her, some spoiled rich girl who had taken her fun by hounding him – and that realisation came crashing on him with a new roar of hate and indignation.

 

He was too quick and too angry— and after a brief struggle he used her own momentum to roll her over until her back slammed against the sand. She struggled every step of the way, kneeing and flailing, pinching and grabbing at whatever she could. If he thought he could make her beg, if he thought he could make her cower in fear just because he was bigger than she, he was sorely mistaken. That he would dare to defy her! That was an offense she would make sure he would not repeat.

 

Eleanor used the momentum from the roll and swung over him, pinning him to the ground. She slammed him down with her own weight and she felt the air escape from him. But still he looked at her with a glare that was full of challenge and contempt. There was something about him, about some raw part of his nature that was steeped in arrogance and impudence. Everything about her rose to the challenge of his bright eyes. Something in the impertinence of his gaze challenged her to subdue him.

 

And so they rolled again in the sand, each one struggling for dominance over the other, each one growing increasingly furious with their opponent’s boneheaded refusal to admit their personal superiority. Every time Vane felt Eleanor subdued, every time he expected a cry for mercy, she would yank or gnaw or kick or snarl out of his grasp. And every time Eleanor felt Vane ready to give in to her, that light would spring in his eyes and she would feel a surge of energy come to him and the fight would go back to where it had started.

 

Eleanor glared, breathless and red.

 

Vane growled, his eyes narrowed and feral, his chest rising and falling for air.

 

_“Charles!”_

 

The tussle came to an abrupt halt. Jack and Bonny stared, dumbfounded, at the ludicrous scene before them.

 

Two pairs of eyes slowly swung around to meet them. Charles was on the ground, pinned in place under a flurry of skirts. One of his hands was pulling at the girl’s hair, the other was trying to keep a clawed hand from his face. The girl had him straddled by the waist, her one free hand wrapped around his hair. They both simply sat there, frozen, neither willing to be the first to let go, as though they’d come to a silent agreement that whoever let go first was to be declared the loser.

 

“What the hell?”

 

Both children pointed at each other. “ _He/She started it!_ ”

 

There was the sound of a musket being drawn. Anne stood with her feet apart, the muzzle of her gun pointed skyward, “I don’t care who started it, I’ll end it!”

 

Eleanor’s spirits lifted. She stared at the thin and resolute little boy—could it be a girl? She saw how the tall and scraggly one, and even the boy atop of her, had both stopped when the girl or boy had drawn their gun, and a plan formulated in her head.

 

Vane stared at Bonny. Next thing he knew, the little blonde thing had slipped out from under his grasp. He snatched at her but managed to grab only a shred of white linen that tore in the air and he fell back, empty handed.

 

The girl dashed for Bonny’s side, sobbing hysterically. Vane shook his head, for surely he must be hearing things. When had the girl been crying?

 

One minute she had been under him, spitting and hissing as a viper, and now she’d ran to Bonny. Tears streamed down her face and Vane watched as the girl kept pointing a decidedly accusatory finger towards him. Though the two scrawny girls looked to be about the same age, the look Bonny was fixing on the devious imp was downright maternal. The look she shot at him, however, was less so.

 

Jack, for his part, at least had the courtesy of looking utterly confused.

 

Jack stared down at the little Guthrie girl, an angelic looking little creature who was in that hysteric sobbing fit girls of the upper classes seemed to take to. It shouldn’t have bothered him, but Jack had never been able to stand the sight of a crying woman. That did not mean he was particularly good at knowing what to do about it. He couldn’t quite punch Charles in the face—for one, Charles was armed, and for two, there was a good chance Jack would not survive the encounter.

 

So he was left to try consoling the sobbing, hiccupping girl.

 

“Come now, come now. No need to cry. No harm was done, and I’m sure he meant no offense by it!”

 

Anne swung her head around and pinned him with a glare so potent Jack thought he could feel the life force draining out of him. ”I mean—we are—What we are, and this is kind of what we, well, do. It’s nothing personal against you!”

 

Jack’s attempt at consolation was not going well.

 

He stared at the little Guthrie girl, her big blue eyes filling with tears.

 

Jack waved his hands in the air as though that could stop the oncoming flood, “But—but—Honestly, you should be flattered!” Anne’s jaw dropped and Jack talked faster, hoping to be able to get his point across before she could draw her gun on him, “Why, you’re the first woman I’ve ever seen Charles take such interest in that he would try to attack you!”

 

An indignant roar thundered from the sand and Jack flinched at its source.

 

“What _interest_?”

 

Vane and his indignation both were left entirely ignored. Anne huffed, took the imp by the elbow and began leading her away. Jack followed in Bonny’s heels.

 

And so Vane was left alone with nothing but the roar of the ocean and his thoughts as he wondered what in the fuck had just happened.

 

\--

 

Vane had not been pleased when he returned to the Fancy’s camp and there found Bonny, Jack and the _thing._

 

Jack had clearly anticipated his reaction and prepared accordingly.

 

When a card of games had first been suggested, Vane had thought his chance for revenge had finally shown itself. The girl- whom he often heard referred to as the Guthrie girl- had looked sheepish and uncertain, lowering her lashes and shuffling her feet uncertainly. But he knew she would be too proud to admit that she had no clue how to play, and should her pride cost her her money, so be it.

 

When he, Jack and Bonny had sat down with the girl, they’d only been too eager to match her starting bet. And then, when the money was on the table, Vane caught a light in her eyes that made his stomach go cold.

 

The girl took the cards in her hand and began to shuffle them with expert skill. With one fluid move, she fanned the cards out before her in a perfect arc, face down, and with one fluid stroke of her fingers the cards flipped face up. She recited the rules of _One-and-Thirty_ with a memorised and downright bored ease, going at a speed that was difficult to even track. Once each card’s respective value had been so noted, she caught the cards in a deft stroke of her hand and began shuffling them again.

 

When she slid the cards to the players, all of the terrible trio had stared in slack-jawed silence.

 

By the time the sun had begun to set and the tide roared its way back, Jack, Bonny and Vane were all hunched over their cards and looking none too happy about it. The money that had been placed at the centre of the table had long found its way to the Guthrie girl’s side. She sighed contently, and Vane swore if she did so again, he would strangle her. They could hang him if they wanted, but he was absolutely going to strangle her.

 

The girl drew a card. Vane looked up and caught her eyes. She smirked, content as a little yellow cat. Vane looked at that little face perched atop that long neck, all hard angles and sharp lines. The girl was as slender as a reed and had about as much feminine softness as Rackham. The comparison came out of nowhere and made Vane smirk. He caught it then, a fault in the Guthrie girl’s smug little smile, a minor flash of irritation, and that caused his smirk to darken all the more. She looked at her hand adoringly, darted her eyes back up to him for a split second, and then she looked back to her cards and sighed happily.

 

“That’s it—“

 

“Charles—“

 

Jack had put a hand to Vane’s shoulder, but something else caught his eye and made his rising bloodlust go momentarily forgotten.

 

Eleanor saw it too.

 

Towards the harbour, where the longboats of the Fancy had been tied, there went one of the strangest processions Nassau would ever bear witness to.

 

Jennings, accompanied by his men, lead Richard Guthrie and Captain Hornigold, accompanied in turn by his men, to the boats.

 

Jack, Bonny and Vane stared in confusion at the inclusion of Richard Guthrie, dressed in leather long boots polished to shiny newness and adorned with a large silver buckle, a scarlet velvet waistcoat worn over a doublet of fine silk brocade woven in gold threat, and a powdered periwig worn in the fashionable French manner.

 

The man looked like he should be a hostage, but instead the men around him deferred to him as they might a King. Even Jennings seemed to laugh when he was supposed to laugh, listen intently when he was supposed to listen, all the while no expression reached his eyes. He even offered the well-clad man his choice of seating on the boat.

 

Vane looked to Jack, “What the fuck is that?”

 

“My guess would be that is Avery’s sponsor.” Jack shrugged, “I suppose you really can put a pig in a wig and make a nobleman out of it.”

 

Vane nodded absently, looking at where the men were boarding the longboats. His gaze soon began to drift further along the camp, where a few of the oarsmates were busying themselves by loading a few rowboats with supplies bound for the _Fancy_.

 

Jack’s eyes narrowed when he regarded Vane, “Don’t even think about leaving this shore.”

 

“What for? You think I care to sit in and listen to some pompous fop talk to our Captain about fashion and hair care?” Vane scoffed, “Best to stay here.” He looked away and wondered when had Jack become so good at reading him. “Besides, I have a game to settle.”

 

“No,” came Bonny’s voice, “You don’t.”

 

“Like hell I don’t!” Vane roared, “Alright girl, if you wish to play with men, it’s time we start playing like real—“

 

Vane’s voice faded when he turned around. The table was there, as he’d last seen it. His cards, Bonny’s cards and Jack’s cards were there, as he’d last seen them.

 

But where the Guthrie girl ought to have been sitting there was now only a sad, lonely little chair.

 

And where the money ought to have been sitting there was only a sad, empty little spot.

 

***

 

Sneaking away had not been difficult. For once, those very aspects that had embarrassed Eleanor about her father had worked to her advantage. The juvenile crew of the Fancy had been so taken with the boorish display that not even the sharp-eyed sailor girl had noticed her leave.

 

Sneaking onto the boats, however, had taken a bit more planning.

 

It was no mystery to anyone that Eleanor had spent a lot of time sitting idly at the shore. What no one knew, however, was how she’d wasted hours of her life gazing upon the ships out at the harbour, and fantasized about how she might be able to sneak aboard one of the vessels in order to pursue some far off adventure in the far off lands that existed to her only through books and sailor’s tales. She would spend hours awake at night thinking her plans over and over, imagining every scenario, everything that could go wrong, everything that might lead to disaster, and everything she could do to avoid those scenarios, everything she could do were she to be caught.

 

Now the time had finally come where she would see if any of her meticulous planning was to be put to good use.

 

She’d hidden behind a tent as she’d waited for the men to load the boat. When they stepped just out of view to take their inventory she’d snuck into the boat and hidden herself in one of the crates, hiding under a fresh piece of canvas. She felt the boat be pushed along the sand, the weightlessness as it floated onto water, and the violent rocking of the vessel when the men scrambled in.

 

And then there was only the sure and swift rows as the boat made its way through the water.

 

The men had never noticed. She’d hidden there in the dark, still and silent.

 

The boat was lifted onto the deck of the ship and unloaded. Eleanor stayed in the silence of the crate and waited for the sound of footsteps to fade.

 

A tentative gaze revealed that the coast was as clear as it ever would be. Eleanor could easily make out were new wood was being laid to replace gaping holes in the deck that were rimmed with burnt wood and gunpowder. Men were being hoisted carefully overboard, taking with them tools, planks of pristine wood and buckets of paint. Sails were being lowered, and their sagging and torn canvases stained with smoke and fire and gunpowder were being unlatched and replaced.

 

While the men busied themselves with repairing the ship, Eleanor snuck out.

 

She had often amused herself by seeing how far she could get into Hornigold’s fort without being noticed, sneaking in and out of walls and playing against herself to see how well she could evade his men’s gazes.

 

A ship, she found, was little different. Here the men were so busy in hurrying themselves to and fro, shouting and laughing among each other, that they could scarce notice yet another little cabin boy walking lazily about the deck, which was well littered with canons and crates for her to duck behind.

 

When one man stopped in his tracks for he could have sworn he saw what appeared to be a dirty dress, he would turn around and find only a trick of the eyes, for where he thought to have spied something peculiar, there was only empty air.

 

Eleanor had only needed to cross a small distance before reaching the dominant structure she took to be the Captain’s quarters. Here she waited until a man came, bearing a tray loaded with wines, and opened to door to let himself in. She followed quickly behind him, never touching the door and letting it close behind her of its own volition.

 

On the sound of the door opening, four pairs of eyes swung towards the entrance. They happily found only the welcoming sight of alcohol. The men never saw the small figure that had snuck into an open armoire and was presently watching them through the slits in the wood.

 

A long table was set before a grand paneled window that stretched from floor to ceiling and gave to the harbour. Dust swam in the air and turned the men into ominous, backlit silhouettes. There too was the smell of rich food, of fish and pork and beef and salt, but beneath that there were the distinct odours of gunpowder and old blood.

 

At the table, there sat Henry Bridgeman and Henry Adams. At the other end of the table there sat her father and Captain Hornigold. The men stared at each other in silence, and the contrast in their appearance added a certain sense of ludicrousness to the scene. Bridgeman and Adams were both cleanly shaven and had their hair pulled back in the proper fashion. Their African and Arabian fineries had been done away with, replaced with the proper clothes of Englishmen—though these were long threadbare, the red colour having faded in the sun and had long become decorated with splatters and bursts of gunpowder and blood that no amount of washing would ever do away with. Their faces were locked in that trained blankness of the higher ranking members of the English Navy.

 

Captain Hornigold, however, had not bothered to try and hide his looks. He wore his dirty blue woolens, but the medals he had won before Cromwell’s victory shone like new atop his breast. His war medals, Eleanor had called them. Not for the manner in which they were won, but more for the fact that Hornigold only seemed to don them when he believed he was about to face some great enemy. His face was scrunched up in a fierce scowl that made his small eyes seem to disappear into his face, his glare locked on the Henry Adams.

 

And then there was her father. Eleanor’s eyes narrowed. Certainly it could be said that her Richard Guthrie too had made no efforts to hide his looks or even his nature. Compared to these men, her father looked utterly ludicrous. His smile was as thin and fake as she had always seen it to be, but if the newcomers noticed it, they had the courtesy to not show it.

 

“I must admit, Captain Bridgeman. I had not expected you to return so soon,” her father drawled.

 

“We ran into some trouble off the coast of Africa and had to cut our trip short.”

 

“The coast of Africa, you say?” Richard’s eyebrows went up as be busied himself by clearing his satchel of a series of papers he placed before him.

 

“I am not proud to admit it, but in our most desperate times, we fell into the business of slave trading without giving due notice to the Royal Africa Company.”

 

“I’m sure, I’m sure. So this time it’s slaves you come to sell? I must admit, Captain Bridgeman, your letter was somewhat cryptic.”

 

“You will understand that with the Royal Africa Company being what it is,” Captain Bridgeman poured himself wine, carefully evading making eye contact, “I did not wish to fully disclose my proposition lest it fall into the wrong hands.”

 

“I can only imagine that you should wish to avoid the Royal Africa Company at all extents.” Richard Guthrie smiled and stared straight at Bridgeman.

 

There was a long, uneasy silence Eleanor could not place. Bridgeman and Adams both went very, very still.

 

“The slaves we found proper vendors for.” Bridgeman went on quickly, “It is the matter of their possessions, Mr. Guthrie, that I come to you now.”

 

“The slave’s possessions?” Guthrie’s eyes shone with amusement.

 

“The slave’s possessions.”

 

Guthrie sat back, steepling his fingers across his stomach, a cruel and mocking light in his eyes.

 

“And what manner of possessions would these slaves have about them, perchance?”

 

Bridgeman looked up from his plate, “One hundred tonnes of elephant tusks, seven chests of Eastern silks, twelve chests of Eastern spices, five chests of precious stones, seven chests of Eastern Jewelry, Nine chests of Eastern Linens, and fifteen chests of silverware.”

 

Eleanor had to bite back a little gasp in her hiding spot. Her imagination went wild. The most conservative value she could estimate for a loot of that size and quality was enough to make her feel faint with giddiness.

 

Her father’s mouth fell into a little mocking o, but he betrayed none of his daughter’s surprise. “Those must have been some well-travelled slaves.”

 

Bridgeman looked down at his plate again, suddenly very fascinated with slicing off a piece of pork. “Much can be said for the resourcefulness of the African race,” he said in a bored, disinterested way.

 

“As well I know.” Guthrie smiled, “Linens, silverware, silks… Why, one would almost think they were on their way to a wedding!”

 

There was another tense, uncomfortable silence. This time, Eleanor saw Adams shoot Bridgeman a look from the corner of his eyes. Bridgeman gave a short, almost indiscernible shake of his head.

 

Hornigold’s eyes narrowed.

 

It was Richard Guthrie who broke the silence when he burst out laughing.

 

“I only joke, of course. Gentlemen, all this sounds very well and good, and I am certainly quite honoured that you should come to me to act as your liaison. But you must understand, last we met, all you wished me to sell were linens and textiles and a few fishing vessels. With things are they are, rumours on the sea being what they are, and, well, with all the letters floating about of bad happenings on the Indian Ocean, I am hesitant to take on such a large trade.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Have you not heard? Why, my dear Mr. Adams. It is the latest rage. England is sending out word that the seas have grown far too dangerous and that good men of business would do well to ignore it entirely.”

 

Bridgeman looked to Adams in silent perplexment. The look he found there must have been as lost as his own, but his voice remained cool and disinterested, “We were not made aware of this.”

 

“Suppose you haven’t heard of the edict, then?”

 

Adams frowned, “What edict?”

 

Richard took a pamphlet from his series of papers and slid it down the table and towards Bridgeman. Adams snatched the offending piece of paper.

 

“ _A Discourse about Pirates, With Proper Remedies to Suppress Them,”_ Adams read. Slowly, he looked up to Guthrie, his face red. The long, harsh shadows of the cabin twisted the features of his face so that his rage suddenly gave him an almost beastly countenance, “What is this?”

 

Hornigold looked up with a snap at Adam’s rising tones. His face had a hungry eagerness to it as though he were just waiting for the excuse to jump to his feet and launch a bullet through Adams’ skull.

 

Guthrie would give Hornigold no such chance. His droll, disinterested voice remained unchanged. “It seems, my dear fellows, that after a series of most dastardly going ons, the English crown has taken it upon herself to protect her darling colonies against the same fate as such that befelled a royal barge on the Indian Ocean.”

 

Bridgeman’s face had gone red, but his voice remained low and steady, “Why should any happenings on the Indian Ocean be considered a threat to colonies of Englishmen?”

 

“It is believed that without the colonies, the tragedies that befell that royal barge might have been avoided. Turns out good, well-meaning men of the colonies have been living among—and even aiding—pirates.”

 

“Pirates?” The word hung in the air like an evil spectre.

 

“Pirates, indeed.” Guthrie drawled, “Mr. Randolph, whose work you currently possess in your hand, would have us believe that our colonial kindness has caused them to grow increasingly ambitious in the ways in which they go about acquiring their livelihood. Ways most distasteful to good, civilised English life.”

 

Guthrie leaned forward re-filled his cup of wine. When he leaned back again, he gestured with his newly filled cup. “To be found aiding pirates in any way is as dastardly a deed as to be charged with piracy oneself, as much a betrayal to the crown as to be caught in the aid a Frenchman.”

 

“A Frenchman!” Adams roared, “Are these pirates not Englishmen? Have they not targeted enemies of the English crown? Have they not left English vessels to go in peace?”

 

“No, Mr. Adams.” Guthrie took a long drink of his wine, “It seems that Mr. Randolph believes they are not Englishmen at all.”

 

“Then what _are_ they?” Adams hissed.

 

Guthrie’s eyes twinkled, “I believe that he has penned the term _Hostis Humani Generis_.”

 

Adams was taken aback, his mouth hanging open.

 

“Enemies to all mankind.” Captain Bridgeman said quietly.

 

A great silence fell about the room, such that even Eleanor in her little hiding spot held her breath for fear that the merest sigh would give her location away.

 

Adams’ jaw moved, but no words came out. Finally, he waved his hand through the air, an agitated and nervous gesture, “I hardly see how this should involve us, Mr. Guthrie. There are no pirates here. We are merely privateers who have maybe strayed a little far by risking the ire of the Royal African Company, but certainly nowhere near what you seem to be accusing us of.”

 

“Accusing! My dear man, no. I accuse you of nothing, I merely state the current state of affairs in light of your recent absence. Unfortunately, you now find yourselves returning to a very different market than the one you saw last. Under Mr. Randolph’s suggestion, the crown has decided to take a different approach to the threat of piracy than the one taken before, and I am afraid to say it very much affects how you and I and anyone else in the colonies does business.”

 

“And what does Mr. Randolph suggest?” Adams smiled bitterly.

 

“That pirates are best treated like rats, my dear privateer.”

 

Adams laughed, a bitter bark of a sound, “Are they to leave out cheese and hope these dread pirates should come sneaking about at night and be thus caught?”

 

“If only.” Guthrie smiled mirthlessly, “No, Mr. Randolph suggests that one does not exterminate a rat by going after the individual varmint, but rather, if one is to extinguish the pest problem, one does this best by targeting their nests. Find the nest and eliminate it, and any surviving rat is left to starve.”

 

“And so it is now that the sea is filled with Agents from the East India company, the English navy, the French navy, the Dutch navy and even bounty hunters, all looking for any hints of these awful pirates and their _nests_.” The last word he said with a bitter and hard edge that made his smile seem wry and contemptuous, “Rumour has it that the prize lies with the man they call the Pirate King himself, a man by the name of Henry Avery.”

 

“ _The Pirate King_?” Bridgeman nearly choked.

 

“Oh yes,” Guthrie drawled with laughing eyes, “For he has captured a king’s bounty, you see. A most despicable fellow, that one. Yes, yes. No crime too big or heinous for him, it is said.”

 

Guthrie finished his drink and splayed out his hands in front of him, “Now that you understand the circumstance surrounding our current market, I hope you understand why I find myself sitting here at some trepidation.”

 

“Your slaves and their slave’s bounty might ring suspicious. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do consider myself quite an adventurous man and I am always up for a good challenge. But you must understand, were I to engage in this undertaking, I would be putting myself and my family in terrible jeopardy. Why, the very thought of my dear, helpless daughter all alone on this Island, at the mercy of greedy sailors and those terrible bounty hunters and their suspicious questions…”

 

Another silence. Bridgeman sighed and leaned back from the table.

“I understand perfectly, Mister Guthrie. I know this is not an easy task we set before you.” He thought for a moment as though he were weighing a great matter in his mind, and not liking the outcome. Bridgman met Guthrie’s eyes, “Along with the commission from your sales, I wonder if you would rest easier at night were we to work out some kind of negotiation to see to your daughter’s safety? A slice of the cargo to be sold at your personal profit, so that you might see to her safekeeping?”

 

Guthrie’s smile slowly slid wider until he looked like one great content toad, “Why, that is terribly generous of you. Certainly it might help. I warn you, Captain Bridgeman, I am a very difficult sleeper.”

 

“Ten tonnes of elephant tusks, one hundred barrels of gunpowder, seventeen chests of fine Portuguese and Dutch guns and muskets.” Adams swung a hard look at Bridgeman, but Bridgeman ignored it.

 

“Why, ten tonnes of ivory!” Guthrie gasped, “That is most gracious. But…” His voice trailed off and he looked almost sad, “my daughter is so young, and she does get so scared…” For one second, Eleanor had been taken aback, for she had never imagined her father to acknowledge her. But she was lucky, for before any sort of hope or affection could ensnare any part of her that may still linger gullibly, Richard Guthrie’s motives in mention of his daughter became quite clear.

 

Bridgeman’s lips went taught. “Fifteen tonnes.”

 

“Fifteen tonnes! Good gracious that is indeed quite a generous offer.” Guthrie made a great show of sighing, “But the terrors of the night do so haunt the young minds of young girls, and with all these terrible rumours going about of horrible pirate kings and bounty hunters, the girl is lucky to get any sleep at all…”

 

“Then get her some milk,” Adams growled. Bridgeman put a placating hand on his arm.

 

“Twenty.” Bridgeman smiled.

 

“Done.” Richard Guthrie was beaming. His daughter felt like she would throw up for the sight of him. Her nausea only grew with the knowledge that some part of her desperately wished that she too could so easily talk men into simply giving her money against their better judgement.

 

Richard Guthrie busied himself by gathering the papers he had earlier spread out before him.

 

Bridgeman and Adams made no move to leave.

 

“Now, there is one final matter.”

 

Guthrie stopped, and for the first time he looked genuinely surprised. “Yes?”                                                                                                                       

 

“The matter of the _Fancy_ itself.”

 

Guthrie frowned, “Do you wish to bring her in for repairs?”

 

“Not quite.” Bridgeman nodded his head towards Captain Hornigold, “My associate has already handed a letter to Captain Hornigold with my final proposition.”

 

Guthrie frowned and looked to Captain Hornigold, but Hornigold never once took his eyes off Adams.

 

“Being?”

 

Bridgeman smiled, and there was something of a happy anticipation to his eyes. “Why, is it not obvious?” His smile broadened innocently, “The matter of my retirement, Mr. Guthrie.”

 

Richard Guthrie’s eyes went wide. “Your retirement?” He gasped, his entire composure slipping as though he could feel the money disappearing from his hands. “But-- So soon?”

 

It was Bridgeman’s turn to smile with triumph, and he leaned back in his chair with his hands steepled before him as Guthrie had earlier done. “Are you a gambling man, Mr. Guthrie?”

 

“Quite so, quite so.”

 

“As am I. I have played enough games to know sometimes it is best to pull from a table when you’ve landed a good score. Try fortune too hard and you might end up losing everything you’ve won. I plan to take the money from this loot and seek out my retirement.”

 

“So a congratulations are in order?” Guthrie sighed, making small effort to hide his disappointment.

 

“Not just for me. _The Fancy_ has served me well, very well, in fact. And you will not find a better group of privateers on the sea. Though my career may be at its end, theirs is just barely beginning.”

 

Guthrie frowned, “You believe they would not follow you into retirement?”

 

“Quite the opposite, I fear that these men are loyal to a fault, and might indeed follow me up Satan’s arse itself if they saw me take lead.” Bridgeman smiled, almost warmly, “That is why I am leaving the _Fancy_ here, in Nassau.”

 

“A warship? In Nassau?” Guthrie gasped, the blood draining from his face. Richard looked to Hornigold, “You knew of this?”

 

“Yes, and I don’t like it.” Hornigold’s round face scrunched up more, “But the fort needs men, and the _Fancy_ has men, and one sight of an English warship might be enough to deter the French.”

 

“But, should the fancy be seen—Should it be recognised—“ Guthrie stammered, and neither Adams nor Bridgeman tried to conceal the enjoyment they were deriving from watching the smug man struggle for words.

 

“Mr. Guthrie, I do understand your concern.” Bridgeman said with the same air of condescension Guthrie had used on him, “I wish I had the time to offer you to think on this offer, but I am growing old, and I am growing weary, and I do wish to make haste on my plans for retirement. If you wish to decline my offer, I will leave with no ill will. I will make for the port at Martinique and there make them the same offer I have made you.”

 

“Martinique?!” Hornigold gasped, “But that’s a French port!”

 

“Is it indeed, Captain Hornigold?” Bridgeman smiled, “I am sorry to say, but that is of little consequence to me.”

 

“What sort of Englishman are you that you would hand over a fully rigged warship into French hands?”

 

Bridgeman widened his eyes almost innocently, “Indeed I am an Englishman, yes, but I am also a businessman, and I go where the market takes me. Is that not true, Mr. Guthrie?”

 

Guthrie gave a lazy shrug, “I would do the same in your position.”

 

Hornigold looked outraged. “I will not stand for it!”

 

Guthrie reached out and grabbed Hornigold by the arm, yanking him to him, “Will you be quiet, man?” Guthrie hissed from behind his teeth, “The French are the least of your worries. You already allowed the _Fancy_ into the harbour, now what’s to stop _Bridgeman_ from turning those guns on Nassau?”

 

Slowly, Hornigold looked to Guthrie’s hand where it rested on his arm as though it were something utterly repugnant to him. On seeing this, Guthrie cleared his throat and removed the offending arm, looking away from Hornigold’s livid stare and trying to ignore the musket and sabres at the retired sailor’s side.

 

“Gentlemen,” Bridgeman’s voice cut through the tension, “I hope I have not caused trouble to come between you.” Adams was watching the entire display with open enjoyment.

 

“Certainly not.” Guthrie cleared his throat again, “Quite the opposite, I believe Captain Hornigold and I are in agreement.” Guthrie looked to Hornigold from the corners of his eyes.

 

Captain Hornigold folded his arms and looked away.

 

Guthrie stood and reached out his hand to Bridgeman, “Captain, I do believe we have a deal.”

 

***

 

Vane sat at the edge of the ocean, his face in a scowl that bore a viciousness Jack had not seen in a long time. How long had it been now since the day Jack had been introduced to a small and angry eyed little boy that held his head high over the tattered clothes that had hung over that pathetically thin body? When Jack first beheld the boy’s eyes, he had been stunned by a flashback of a time well into his youth when a bleak Irish winter had left him scavenging the snow for food. He had been after the trail of an errant hare when he came upon a starving wolf. The creature had been little but bone and sinew, and yet it had stared at Jack with a cold and analyzing detachment, and Jack had clearly seen in those strange eyes how little his life mattered to that creature who would not hesitate to tear his throat out if the notion should so strike it. He had seen that look once more in his life, in the bright eyes of the young boy introduced to him as Charles Vane.

 

Though Jack had towered over him, he had never forgotten how terribly old the boy looked. Even as the silence broke and he came to learn whatever little he could of the boy, he’d never quite gotten over the peculiar feeling that there would always seem to span a great chasm between he and Charles, a span of years and decades that seemed to perpetually separate the playful boy with laughing eyes from the grave man with the eyes of a wolf.

 

Jack felt Anne come up behind him. “What the fuck’s gotten into him?” She nodded her head to where Vane sat brooding on the sat.

 

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

 

“What? Vane sulking? Yeah. What’s it to you?”

 

Jack turned to Anne then, “Honestly?”

 

There was a graveness to Jack that made Anne pay heed. She nodded her head in encouragement.

 

“…I’m feeling a little insulted.”

 

Anne frowned. “Insulted?”

 

“Did you see him going on with that girl? Do you know how long it took him to say half those words to me? I had to work my arse off for one lousy sentence, and here some little blonde thing skips in and suddenly he’s Mr. Eloquent?”

 

Anne searched his face as though she looked for some confirmation that Jack had finally completely lost it. “Are you insane? They looked like they were about ready to kill each other.”

 

“Precisely, my dear heart. Do you know how hard I had to work to get him to want to kill me? Why, I had to work my fucking arse off! Patiently making my way from getting him to barely acknowledge my presence with what could only be described as a growl, to months of hard work on getting him to say one complete sentence to the effect of my mother’s personage, then months of carefully planned and eloquently executed acts of male japing as I fought my way through to tepid brevity before he and I became the very visage of male bonding and enduring friendship that we are today.”

 

“Why do you care?”

 

“Well…” Jack fluttered his eyelashes. “…my feelings are a little hurt,” he said with a pout.

 

Of course. What should she have expected? Anne rolled her eyes and threw her hands up in exasperation, feeling both terribly annoyed and enraged that she had taken him seriously for even but one second.

 

“I’m leaving.” She spun on her heels and gave Jack her back.

 

Jack’s voice rang out from behind her. “Make them better.”

 

“Leaving.”

 

Jack began to give chase, “A woman’s love is but the balm of all aching hearts!” He called after her.

 

Anne didn’t bother to turn around and just kept walking away. “And a fist to the face is but a cure for all idiots.”

 

“I do love it when you sweet talk so. …Wait for me, my dove!”

 

***

 

Jack’s voice began to give to distance as he forgot Vane and pursued his next target with that particular brand of unrelenting affection so characteristic to Jack. Finally, Vane had some peace. At least by way of noise.

 

Since coming to New Providence, Vane had felt his mood grow steadily uneasy.

 

It had started with a night of debauchery at a tavern, with how quickly and easily he’d settled into shit talking with Jack and Bonny, how naturally and unhesitatingly he’d fallen into japes and jokes and a sense of comfortable relaxation he now felt was utterly peculiar. And then this morning he’d even gotten into a squabble with some random little girl.

 

Something about that girl had hit a nerve since first he had seen her smirk and heard her laugh on the wind, since he’d seen her laughing eyes and saw the invitation of a chase, and she had sunken under his skin ever since. He had killed men with his bare hands, hell, he had enjoyed the act thoroughly. He’d never hesitated to kill.

 

And yet on that sand, with that girl, he had felt something he had never felt before, something utterly nameless to him. The fight had not been one for survival, and it horrified him to know he had not had the slightest intention of killing her. Why did he engage in a fight in which he had no particular interest in killing? Most disturbing yet, why had he no particular interest in killing when he could do it so easily? She had insulted him, hell she had insulted him more times in those short moments than many others had through the duration of years.

 

Even Jack could only get so far, and even this Vane took with some amount of distance, for this was simply how Jack seemed to speak to everybody, and Vane would speak in turn for this was how he had seen the other men on the ship behave.

 

So what had been so different with that wretched and strange little girl?

 

The experience was driving him mad with its foreign and alien bizarreness. Even his own reaction baffled him. He was not angry, he was not upset-- both feeling he was well acquainted with. No, the truth was he was utterly and unabashedly perplexed. And Vane, through everything that had happened in his life, had never felt perplexed.

 

The feeling was new and altogether disconcerting, and he did not know why this should be, but he knew that he did not like it. And he knew the girl was somehow to blame for this. What had happened with that girl on the sand? To fight without wanting to kill, to fight not for honour nor gain? It had never been in his nature to argue for the sake of an argument, rather he only argued so when his survival or gain necessitated upon it.

 

And yet there he had been, yelling insults for the sake of insults and entering into a petty argument. None of it had made sense. Climbing trees? Name calling? Hair pulling? Tussling in the sand? These were not rational acts, for, if he had not intended on killing the girl, and he most certainly had no intention of fucking her, then those acts had had no purpose. And why would he engage in any act that served no purpose? The thought was utterly peculiar, and he soon became convinced that there must have been some as-of-yet unseen motive for his actions, and he would not rest until these hidden motives made themselves apparent to him.

 

Now more than ever did Vane wish they had never left Port Elizabeth. He had been against returning to this infernal corner of the globe since Avery had announced it. Vane knew this wretched hellhole held nothing good, and he had been right, as he always was. Nassau was as empty as a graveyard, Jennings had been as distant as a ghost, Avery had put Vane on temporary banishment and Nassau seemed to be under the rule of scrawny thirteen year old hellspawn, a laughing imp who seemed to derive nourishment from torturing him as surely as a plant derived its life force from the sun. Nothing made sense to him anymore, and he despised it. He despised more that he seemed utterly powerless to do anything about these things which so tormented him.

 

Beyond the dark haze of his thoughts, he could see the Fancy out in the harbour. A strange clamour seemed to emanate from the great ship. Vane frowned and collapsed his spyglass, a beautiful contraption of wood and bronze he had acquired from a dying man aboard the _Sawai_. The men on the ship were busying themselves by heaving heavy cargo onto the small boats perched off the ships’ starboard side. Barrels, trunks and bales of Ivory all were being stripped from the ship and deposited onto Nassau’s shores.

 

Vane contemplated the scene before him on the still burning embers of his perceived helplessness.

 

***

 

A trunk slammed down on the sand with a soft thud. The sailor, a thickset and ruddy oarsman by the name of Percy, let out a breath of relief and stared down at the row of trunks he had finally finished unloading. As he gazed lovingly at the fruit of his labours, and the downright miraculous completion thereof under that unrelenting Caribbean sun, he could not make notice of the events beginning to take place behind him.

 

Vane had waited until the man’s back had been turned to make his move. With the practiced swiftness and silence he had learned on those dark days where the merest sound might be cause for a flogging, Vane had snuck to the small rowboat. He had moved with an almost unnatural dexterity and strength, and had silently guided the small boat through the soft and fine sands until the resistance gave way under the welcoming give of water.

 

Percy would not notice the missing vessel until Vane had rowed his way halfway to the Fancy.

 

Vane could see him there, on the shore. Small figures in the distance, limbs flailing gestures he could not see but could hazard an educated guess, whose yells and curses were blunt sounds in the wind.

 

Just the very act of rowing away from that vile little sandpost was already lifting Vane’s spirits. He took great enjoyment in watching Nassau slowly become smaller and smaller until he could pretend it, and all its annoyances and aggravations disappeared altogether. The waves lapped gently against the sides of the small boat, the wood floors and benches grew pleasantly cool with the ocean spray, and even the tarp seemed to sigh contently.

 

Vane thought Nassau must indeed be cursed, for the simple act of rowing away from it had made him so giddy with contentment he even saw the tarp move.

 

Vane was quite content to think himself somewhat lightheaded in his satisfaction, until he saw the tarp move again.

 

Vane did not stop rowing the boat, but he went very, very still.

 

For one moment he would again allow himself to think he had seen things, but then the tarp moved again.

 

It was then that he noticed how strange it was, that the tarp crumpled up at the end of the boat should be made of two separate coats, one being of the coarse and crude sailing canvas, and another level of a fine and delicate white weave and details that looked decidedly… Embroidered.

 

The tarp moved again.

 

And then, he saw it.

 

It came about slowly, surely. Carefully. Small and hesitant as a small rabbit.

 

A hand slid out from under the tarp, blindly feeling around the coarse and salt-encrusted wood.

 

A small, pale little hand.

 

Vane watched, and not for the first time that day did he find himself utterly dumbfounded.

 

The small hand gently felt at the wood until it came over that stretch of white embroidered linen. The hand stopped when it could make out the fine embroidery there. Here it crumpled the material into a small, skinny little fist and then, quick as a bunny, it snatched the material and disappeared back under the tarp.

 

Vane stared. Utterly and completely slack-jawed.

 

He felt so many things, thought so many more, that the utter confluence of emotions too lurid to describe and silent oaths so blasphemous so as to defy words all seemed to build and bubble and boil within him until all thoughts coherent and incoherent alike melded and exploded within the entirety of his being until there was left to the whole of his consciousness only one singular word:

 

“Unbelievable.”

 

He was so many things he actually thought he might be having somesort of stroke.

  
There she was, curled up on the end of the boat, tucked into the folds of her white linen dress like some great white cat cuddled into its fur. Eleanor Guthrie made a great show of looking at him with utter boredom and contempt, as though he had trespassed on some sacrosanct female space of her possession, when in reality he had just found her stowing away under a filthy tarp with muddy sea water sogging her clothes. And she stared at him as though she had somehow caught him in some wrongdoing.

 

Worst yet was how the chit didn’t even bother to look scared. Hell, she didn’t even have it in her to look surprised!

 

“You do understand I could kill you, right?” Vane said, his surprise genuinely steadying his voice, “You are well within understanding that I am not only armed, but that I belong to a select group of men who enjoy little else than killing those who so much as look at us in a way we find distasteful. And here you—You seem devoted to the sole and implicit purpose annoying me!”

 

Guthrie scoffed, rolling her eyes, “Good God, the arrogance of you.”

 

“Of me!?”

 

The girl swung a hard and angry look at him, “Who do you think you are that my life should revolve around you in any capacity? Who are you to believe that your presence plays any part in any decision I made?”

 

“ _What_?” Yes, some part of his mind thought. Definitely having a stroke.

 

“You heard me!”

 

Vane’s jaw moved up and down, but no words would come out, until finally he said, “What I heard is absolute and complete _gibberish_.”

 

“Oh, and your idea that I am, how was it, devoted to you— _you_ —some ill-kempt, arrogant and barbaric cabin boy!”

 

“Cabin boy?” He gasped.

 

 _“Cabin boy!”_ She roared.

 

At that moment, it did not occur to Vane that he was, indeed, a cabin boy.

 

Neither did that fact occur to Eleanor, who believed the word to be a grave offense, and had thoroughly meant it as such as opposed to a mere observation of the boy’s status among his crew.

 

And so it was that the two children somehow managed to completely understand each other while also completely misunderstanding what they were actually saying.

 

“I could kill you,” Vane said plainly.

 

“And yet you wouldn’t,” Eleanor said with equal simplicity.

 

 _“_ You think you should order me not to kill you and that I should stop in my tracks and bow at your command?”

 

“No, unless I have judged your character wrong.”

 

“Then what, pray tell, have you gleaned of my character that you should think yourself at such liberties with me and my patience, you evil little sea imp?”

 

“I don’t think you’d be content to be remembered as the cabin boy who hung because he killed some provincial’s daughter.”

 

Vane sighed, trying to work some of his usual steady composure back into his voice that was once again starting to betray his young age, “While you’re taking the liberty to presume that which I do and do not want by means of legacy,” he growled from behind clenched teeth, “tell me then how do I think I should like to be remembered, seeing that you are such a scholar on the matter of my innermost workings?

 

The Guthrie girl thought about this for a moment, “As the boy who so mastered the art of glaring that his entire countenance froze in a glower so formidable that men died of terror just by gazing upon you.”

 

He had no conceivable response for this, for he was indeed sure that none existed. So all he said was, “You are, without a doubt, the strangest creature I have ever met.”

 

He was angry because she was right. More than that, he was angry because a complete stranger had seen right through him. And this of all strangers. Still, that did not stop him.

 

He stood. The boat rocked under his movements. He noted with satisfaction how he towered over the girl where she kneeled on the floor, the sun behind him drowning the impudent creature in his shadow. “Hanging or not, I’d be willing to risk it. Or maybe I’d just be content on simply beating that smug little smile out of you.”

 

The girl made no effort to stand, nor cower, nor even to move. She just looked up at him there with that same inscrutable face he’d seen when first he’d come to the Island.

 

She said simply, “No, you wouldn’t.” And shrugged her thin shoulders.

 

The boat came to a stop.

 

“And how can you be so sure?”

 

Eleanor met his eyes unflinchingly, her face held an inscrutable and unreadable expression that called to mind strange tales he’d heard from those men who’d been to Egypt and claimed to have beheld the Sphinx. With that peculiar and detached stare, the girl drawled on as though nothing had changed.

 

“Unless you should wish to spend the rest of your life picking up after a ship’s crew, I should imagine you would like to be a Captain one day.”

 

“What—“ Now he was no longer sure who was the one going mad as the girl went on another mad tangent.

 

“Save for the ostrich looking fellow, I hardly ever see you interact with anyone and you seem to harbour no great affection for interpersonal relations, so you could hardly be harbouring dreams of making your career as a Boatswain.”

 

“Don’t think just because you found me with my breeches round my ankles that you know anything about my interpersonal—“

 

Guthrie went on, not even bothering to hear him, “—You’re thick headed, clearly hold a very high opinion of yourself and an even higher opinion of your own self worth, so I can’t imagine you should like to spend the rest of your life as second or first mate beholden to anyone else’s orders—“

 

He scoffed indignantly, “I’m the one with the high opinion of myself?”

 

“--You’re quick with your sword as you are with your gun, so I can’t imagine you’d much take to a merchant’s life where ones livelihood depends on their customers remaining alive. I won’t even bother with the notion that you should ever be in pursuit of a professional career in the Royal navy—“

 

“How would you—“ She wasn’t wrong, but it annoyed him that she’d guessed it, and there was something in her tone that seemed to imply offense.

 

“--So it only stands to reason that you should wish to be Captain one day.” She concluded in a singsong voice. She made a great show of making herself comfortable, sitting back on the dirty floor of a half rotten boat with all the dignity of a queen lounging upon her throne, all the while she never took her eyes off him, that arrogant smirk never fading from her face. “And circumstances being what they are, and being that I am certain I currently carry information quite relevant in regards to any future aspirations you may hold, it would not only be in your best interest to do as I say in order to learn what I know, but it would also be in the best interests of your future to seriously reconsider how much respect you show me. That is, if ever you should hope to be the kind of captain who actually stands any chance of turning a profit. You are well capable of killing me and beating me, that is to be sure. But would it be in your present or future interest to do so?”

 

The words had been all the stranger for they had come from the high voice of a girl so young she hadn’t even a set of tits yet.

 

His response an eloquent, “Has anyone ever told you you talk way too much?”

 

“Constantly. I don’t see it, personally.”

 

“I can see how you wouldn’t.”

 

Her eyes twinkled, “Doesn’t change the fact that I’m right, and you know it.”

 

“How can I know it if I don’t even know what you’re talking about? Being Captain? Even if one were to say you’re right, which one doesn’t, and which you’re not, none of this matters. I’ve been on the ship for hardly two years and I have no intention of leaving my Captain and _why am I even talking about this with you_ —“ He was finding his throat was increasingly becoming sore, and some part of his mind was aware that this was the most he’d spoken in—This was the most he’d spoken since—

 

Ever.

 

The girl’s voice cut through his thoughts, her tone cryptic as the sphinx, “I never said it was _you_ who would leave.”

 

Vane sighed in aggravation at yet another one of the girl’s damnable riddles, “What are you talking about?”

 

“Do as I say and I’ll tell you.”

 

“Tell me and I’ll think about not killing you.”

 

Vane watched with some sense of satisfaction as the grave and important expression on the girl’s face began to give way to irritation. “Fine.” She snapped, her own voice now betraying her childish and petulant age, “But tell me this, how long did it take your Captain to find anyone who was willing to sell his loot for him?”

 

“That is none of your—“

 

“—And how well liked would you say your Captain is compared to oh, say, yourself?”

 

Vane remembered how he had sat at that beach and berated himself for not having thought to kill her when he’d had the chance. He thought how now was the time to do it, to put the nonsensical girl in her place, to silence her once and for all.

 

He stared down at that arrogant face, that haughty and strange little face. No, she did not titter and laugh at him. Nor did she coo and sigh. But she also did not defer to him, did not cower before a man who was stronger, bigger and far more dangerous than she was. She simply met his eyes and held his gaze and he saw there something far worse than the laughter, nowhere near as fulfilling as fear.

 

The girl-- Eleanor Guthrie stared at him with the indifference of familiarity.

 

He should have found this insulting. He should—and did—find everything about her insulting. No one had ever spoken to him on such terms, much less argued—bickered—with him as though they were—Vane did not even know. Without the conversation turning to orders about the ship or errands that needed to be run, no one but Jack had ever talked to him at such lengths, and not even Jack had ever dared take such familiarity so as to dare argue with him.

 

The relationship between him and Jack was as he found the relationship between all men on the great ship, that familiarity essential to the workings of a crew. They could laugh at each other and confide in certain things, they could trust each other in drink and battle. But beyond the halls of a tavern or the decks of the ship the two men should might as well have been strangers. There was always a distance between them which Vane cultivated and which Jack respected in his own way. No matter how much time they spent together, the relationship between him and Jack was one of mutual understanding that would never cross into anything anyone could conceivably call familiarity.

 

This creature, however, had no such decency.

 

There was none of the distance or hesitation of Jack’s gaze, none of the thinly veiled suspicion of Anne’s eyes, none of the sympathy of Avery’s paternal smiles or constant vigilance of Jennings’ shrewd gaze. The girl had faced off with him from the minute he’d beheld her, shoved her way into his presence and instantly began making demands of him that no one had ever dared before. Now she had stepped beyond that. She had not demanded his familiarity, she had simply assumed it as though it were hers to take as no one else ever had.

 

The wind had gone still and the birds had gone quiet until all there was was the sound of the lapping and incessant waves.

 

So he didn’t kill her.

 

Worse yet, he felt no remorse for it.

 

A silence fell upon the boat as the two children regarded each other as soldiers might before a duel.

 

The waves crashed against the shore in the distance. Men’s laughs were carried on the wind. A gull cried overhead.

 

It was Eleanor Guthrie’s voice that cut the silence.

 

“You’re a very angry person.”

 

Another silence.

 

“Is it because you’re so short?”

 

The more she spoke, the more Vane became increasingly aware of a rising, throbbing sensation right behind his eyes. The onset of a headache the likes of which he had never quite experienced before. He sighed, “You know, I really have killed people.”

 

He stared at her in the vague hope that his words might this time have had their desired effect.

 

“…Because you’re short?”

 

His words had not had their desired effect.

 

“Not because I’m—I am bigger than you!”

 

“Yes but I’m a girl of thirteen. “ She said importantly.

 

The throbbing behind his eyes grew into a full blown headache, “I am _not_ —I just _look_ \-- Because my— _Rackham_ has the proportions of a _stick insect_! It’s a _trick of the eyes_!”

 

The girl sighed, “Whatever you say.”

 

“When we are on _my_ ship—“

 

“Boat.”

 

“--On _my_ _boat_ ,” Vane hissed through clenched teeth, “it is indeed whatever I say. Now keep it at that or I’ll have you swimming to shore.”

 

Vane sat down, picked up the oars, and began to row the boat.

 

But he didn’t row it to the beach.

 

Vane watched with some satisfaction as Eleanor Guthrie’s composure began to give way as she saw the boat row further and further from the safety of her home’s shore, “What are you doing?”

 

“I’ll find out what you have to tell me one way or the other.”

 


	8. Chapter 4: Alliances

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your continued support of this story! At present, I am in desperate need of a beta reader who might help me catch those typos and formatting errors that seem to escape my notice after countless revisions. If you would be interested, please contact me at my tumblr http://notaninternetkiller.tumblr.com.
> 
> Thank you so much for your continued support, and enjoy the new chapter!

 CHAPTER FOUR

 ALLIANCES

 

The sun was starting to drop low over the horizon, spilling into the Captain’s cabin of the _Fancy_ from tiled windows opened astern, the dying red and gold light casting Avery’s lone shadow long into the darker recesses of the cabin. It was one of those rare times in which Avery found himself alone, and at present he was vaguely aware that he did not like this feeling much. Without the raucous cries of his crew, their laugh and their song, Avery was left alone to feel every year his age, and he did not like this.

 

He stood in silence, his arms folded across his back and his back straight out of ancient hard learned habit. From a distance he looked every bit the image of the stern naval officer he had long ceased to be, but only when one ventured close could one see the sad, almost bittersweet look on his face.

 

Before him, towering over his large desk and demanding the attention of the room, there was stretched across the wooden wall a map. It was a grand thing, of Italian manufacturing, meticulously rendered and written in the old language. It was not like the new maps coming out of England, written in the English hand for the English speaker, and this had become something of a source of pride for Avery. Jennings had always been on his case that his map and its Roman language were too archaic, too old fashioned. Avery had merely laughed and said this was only fitting, for he was an old fashioned man.

 

Upon his map there were pinned series and clusters of small flags, some of red hue for those years before the _Fancy_ , some of white for those years afterwards. Between the two, Avery’s flags seemed to dot the entire stretch of the known world, and they told the story of a man well travelled, a man who in his life had seen every corner of the world and never been quite content with what he found there, so that he was always compelled to find that opposite corner in the hopes of whatever elusive goal seemed just always out of reach. Each flag told a story of an adventure, of a trial, of a war. Each flag told the story of a man who wished to conquer the world.

 

And yet, those very flags seemed to hold no draw to Avery.

 

No, it was those large swatches of blank, virgin territory, bereft of any names be they Latin or English, and having no flag to mark them, that seemed to hold his shrewd gaze. Those large blank swatches that stretched to the south of the Spanish Main, the large blank swatch far below the tip of the Americas, the large blank swatch that crowned the top of the world and was said to be home to mythical giants and beasts alike, the large blank swatches over the African continent, where cities were reputed to be made of jewels and one could find entire civilisations untouched since the travels of Alexander.

 

All of those places unseen, untouched, unknown.

 

All those places life and circumstance had kept just out of Avery’s reach.

 

How old was he now, he wondered.

 

Old, was his body’s response. Old.

 

The sun sank below the horizon, and Avery could tell there was a storm to come before a cloud so much as peered over the edge of the earth. In Avery’s old age, his knees had come to ache whenever there was a storm brewing, as his hands grew useless and stiff whenever that wall of moisture pressed down from the sky in preparation for the coming rain.

 

So it was that Avery was to retire.

 

Avery sighed and turned to his desk, and that man they called the Pirate King was left feeling so very small and so very old under the monolithic map that stared down at him with all the lands he’d failed to conquer.

 

Avery picked up a quill and set about putting his affairs in order before Jennings could come in and berate him once more for being a foolish old man who could never keep up with his paperwork. The only difference between them, Avery thought, was that Avery had the good sense to know he was old. Jennings wasn’t so far behind him, but the man was as stubborn as an old sea turtle and would hide inside his shell until one day his crew would have to fish him out of the sea, an old and decrepit man still trying to sail like a boy of five and twenty.

 

When Avery heard the door of his cabin smash open, he halfway expected to find the very sea turtle there, glaring at him in that way Avery knew to mean that a lecture would soon be visited upon him.

 

But what Avery found when he looked up was not his quartermaster.

 

There, framed by the dying light that poured in from the deck outside, did he see the young and sharply angled face of Charles Vane. The boy’s unnaturally bright eyes seemed to glow with the fading light, and his expression was taught and intense as that of a hunting hound bringing his master a kill. Avery startled at the sight, his stomach going cold at the sight of his cabin boy’s almost animal like intensity.

 

“Good God, what is it, boy?”

 

Before Vane could answer, Avery’s fading eyes were able to discern something of movement behind the lad.

 

Avery’s eyes struggled to make sense of what he saw. Behind Vane, bound to him by the boy’s vice like grip on a small and thin wrist, there stirred some strange and small form clad in white. Avery strained to try and see what squirmed behind the boy. For one moment he could have sworn he saw the flash of teeth and even heard something he took for a growl, but surely he must have been mistaken for when, after it stopped squirming under Vane’s grip, the figure looked up at Avery, there bloomed the soft and perfect face of an angelic little girl.

 

Avery’s suspicion about his eyes’ deceit was well confirmed, for once the girl stopped moving she came to regard him with wide, startled blue eyes and a face as innocent as that of a china doll, as likely to growl and bite as he was to fly. There was a pause Avery could not read wherein the child did seem to regard him in turn.

 

Avery never caught how her eyes had flicked between himself and Vane. Never caught the spark of light that flared behind her eyes when she saw the expression on the startled old Sea Captain’s face.

 

Vane, too, regarded Eleanor, but he watched her with thinly veiled suspicion, as one might watch a chameleon before it could begin to disappear into its surroundings.

 

“I caught this,” Vane put his hand between the girls shoulder blades and shoved her forward, causing her to stumble towards Avery’s desk in a flurry of white linen skirts. He had only shoved her with enough force to push her forward, and yet the girl took the stumble in a dramatic flourish, nearly falling over and just managing to catch herself before she could fall. Vane thought this well strange, for the ship was still in its harbour waters, barely even swaying in the calm Island tide so that the floor beneath their feet was almost entirely steady and thus could not be accounted for the girl’s violent reaction. A vague sense of foreboding took root in the back of Vane’s mind but this he shoved aside, so ready was he to get this over with and put the Guthrie brat well into his past.

 

“Guthrie sent his daughter by way of a spy.” He said with some satisfaction.

 

Vane had not known what he’d expected from the girl by way of a reaction, though he’d had his hopes, but whatever it was, it was not the display he got. He knew something was wrong just by the sheer amount of time the girl was taking getting her bearings after his shove.

 

Slowly she rose. The same girl who’d landed on him with fists, teeth and nails now moved with an almost painful slowness and, Vane frowned, was that a tremble he saw? Surely not.

 

Eleanor faced Avery, but always seemed to look down from him, her eyes hidden under a sweeping veil of lashes.

 

The placid little sphinx Vane had dragged to his Captain was gone, taking with her the girl who spoke with the gravity of a Commodore in a voice as high as the chimes of a bell. In her place stood a doe eyed, shrinking little thing, all shuffling feet and shy glances and nervous smiles and pink cheeks daintily flared with dimples.

 

What had earlier been a vague sense of foreboding in the back of Vane’s mind was now a full blown alarm.

 

Avery sat back with a twinkle in his eye and a large, silly smile across his doughy face. “Why, if that’s the case then she certainly is the most darling spy I have ever beheld.”

 

Vane stopped, his face swinging up to look at his Captain, his normally impassive expression looking so shocked that Avery burst into laughter.

 

Before Vane could even muster a reply, the door to the cabin swung open without so much as the hesitation of a knock. That in and of itself was enough to herald Jennings’ entrance before the man had stormed into the cabin. Vane caught sight of a gaggle of peering, curious faces on the outside deck craning their necks behind Jennings in an effort to get a glimpse of the Captain’s cabin before the door could shut them completely out.

 

In the cabin, all could hear the sounds of disappointment from outside the door.

 

Jennings wasted no time, “Captain, the men are under the impression that—“ And here Jennings stopped. He was a tall, lanky man, whose elongated limbs seemed to only compliment his already somewhat aquiline features. Unlike Rackham, however, Jennings had enough years on this earth to have overcome these features with some sense of co-ordination and a heightened awareness of his surroundings. So it was that he was only too keenly aware that a small figure stood well under his waist, being placed firmly between himself and his Captain.

 

Jennings looked down and saw the small figured for what it was, though by the bewildered expression on his face it was clear that some part of his brain refused to acknowledge what his eyes told him.

 

Avery sat back in his chair. Vane braced himself.

 

“Who,” Jennings roared, the sheer volume of his voice causing Avery to wince, “brought a woman onto this ship?”

 

Avery grimaced and vaguely plunged a finger into his ear to make sure his ear drum was still there. “It was Vane,” He said airily, but Jennings was already on a tirade.

 

“I cannot believe any of the men would be so stupid, so incorrigible, so—“ Jennings stopped mid sentence, frowning as though he’d just heard something that had caused his mind to stop mid-sentence. He looked to Avery, “…It was who, sir?”

 

Vane squared his shoulders, his voice deep and grave, “It was me, sir.”

 

Jennings blinked, “ _You_ brought a woman onto the ship?”

 

“Yes sir.”

 

Jennings made a face, “Oh, come off it. Who are you trying to cover for? I know it’s not Rackham because the other one would have his head on a spike before he brought a woman on deck.”

 

Eleanor sniffled, “I am sorry to have caused so much trouble, my Lord Captain—“

 

“Now, now,” Avery waved his hand dismissively, even while his cheeks flushed a glowing and content pink, “I’ll have none of that here, there are no lords in this ship.”

 

“I am sorry, I must have been in error.” The girl said in that strange, whimpering little voice, “For once I saw the regal manner of your clothes and the fine upstanding nature of your carriage, I merely assumed—“

 

Vane rolled his eyes with such force he thought it was a wonder his eyes didn’t out and pop out of his head. It was a display that went entirely unnoticed.

 

Avery’s smile turned into a grin that didn’t bother to hide any of his pride. He sat upright in his chair, his shoulders squaring around him, “You have a sharp eye on you, lass. You know a Navy man when you see one. But our days in the fleet are long since past, you need take no formalities with the likes of simple seamen such as us.”

 

Vane stared and wondered whether he would gag or vomit. Not just for the absurd act of the girl, but for the fact that it seemed to be working on his Captain, who stared at the little straw haired demon as though she were his own most precious child.

 

“Your _cabin boy_ is telling the truth, my lor—“ She blushed prettily, her long lashes fluttering over eyes which she quickly downcast in demure shyness, “--My captain. Though, I do assure you, I am no spy.”

 

Vane didn’t know which he liked less from her, _my Lord_ or _my Captain_. Either way he was content to accept they were equally nauseating. Much to his surprise, Vane found himself missing the hissing and spitting little lion cub who’d wrestled him on the beach.

 

“I was, indeed, hiding in a boat. But oh, please, I beg of you, do believe me! I meant no harm in this! And I most certainly did not mean to spy, oh, surely I did not! I beg you to believe me!”

 

Vane watched in horror. Surely this could not be the same creature that had, just hours previously, pummeled him with fruit when he’d threatened her with a blade.

 

Avery shrank back in his seat as though as mortally terrified of the girl’s hysterics as another man might fear a cannon with a lit fuse, “Peace child, peace. I would not have a woman done in with a swoon aboard my ship! Whatever will the men think!”

 

Vane knew damn well what the men would think, but he vaguely suspected that were he to voice his suspicions, Avery would not hesitate to skin him for the mere suggestion that any harm should come to his newfound precious little foundling.

 

Vane’s thoughts must have shown across his face because he was suddenly aware of Jennings’ shrewd gaze watching him with a curious and intense interest. Vane looked away, suddenly very interested with the state of his Captain’s windows.

 

Jennings turned to Guthrie then with a hard stare. “Then what in God’s name were you doing in the boat?” Jennings asked, and Vane smirked despite himself.

 

“I—I---“ She worried at her lower lip until it flushed crimson to match the blush on her cheeks. With a dramatic flourish, Eleanor threw her head to the side, sending blond curls fluttering about her rosy face. “Oh, but I musn’t! It is… Far too embarrassing.”

 

Avery laughed, a big sound that came from the depths of his belly and seemed to roll across the room, “Come now, girl. We are all gentlemen here. …Of a sort. There is no need to be abashed before us!”

 

“I was…” Her voice broke off, “I was hiding.”

 

Even Vane swung around to face her then, his expression equally surprised and apprehensive.

 

“Hiding?” Avery’s voice went grave, “From who, child?”

 

“I was hiding…” And here again her voice trailed off. She paused as though she were overcome from the sheer gravity of her next words, as though she were fighting for the strength she needed to speak the truth. Or, as Vane well suspected, as though she were trying to come up with her next words, “I was hiding… from my lessons.”

 

It was the first time anyone, on that ship or on that earth, heard Charles Vane actually sputter.

 

Only Eleanor seemed to ignore him.

 

“Oh come _on_!” Vane roared.

 

Jennings pinned Vane with the hard look of a disciplinarian and Vane squared his shoulders in indignation. Avery ignored the boy completely.

 

Avery smiled, like the smile of an indulgent and understanding uncle, “What manner of lessons?”

 

Slowly Eleanor looked back up at Avery, her wide blue eyes full of earnestness. She spoke in a shy little voice, so full of feminine virtue and grace.

 

“The Virginals.”

 

Vane’s jaw dropped. He was only vaguely aware of Avery’s response, an excited and happy tirade having something to do with ‘good, solid English instrument’ for ‘good solid English music’ and something about how much better it was than ‘the infernal clanking of that continental Harpsicord.’

 

Eleanor’s face glowed, and she gladly indulged him. Next thing Vane knew, Eleanor and Avery were engaged in a spirited conversation concerning the virtues of the English Virginals versus the Continental Harpsichord.

 

“This is insane!” Vane yelled, “There were no—There were no lessons!” He looked at Avery but he could well feel the hard and heavy weight of Eleanor’s glare as she silently cursed him for having the audacity to interrupt her victory. “She claimed she knew something—something of you—and this she used to try and bribe me!”

 

Eleanor took in a sharp breath and hoped no one had noticed. For one moment she froze and the world seemed to stop around her. Her eyes flicked from Avery, to Jennings, and back to Avery. She saw Avery’s shocked and startled expression, saw the furrowing of Jennings’ brows.

 

And out of the corner of her eyes she saw Vane.

 

Eleanor swooned.

 

“Oh!” She cried, “It is true, it is true!”

 

“It’s a lie, it’s a lie! She absolutely— Wait, what?” Vane started.

 

“Once again, he is telling the truth!” Eleanor cried, “Once again, I am caught in the tangled web of my own deception!”

 

Vane stared at the display and for one moment he didn’t know if she was the worst actress or the best actress in the world.

 

“Oh, curse my female weakness!” The little girl cried again, pressing the back of her hand against her forehead, “Having been deprived of a mother and abandoned by my father, I lack the guiding male hand that should steady the deceitful nature that has been the scourge of the feminine sex!”

 

Worst actress, Vane thought. Definitely the worst actress.

 

But when Vane saw the look on Avery’s face it became clear that Vane was alone in that conclusion. His mouth moved up and down for a few wordless seconds while he stared at his Captain in disbelief, “You cannot be serious! Who even talks like that?”

 

Avery did not look to Vane, but the tone of his voice made it quite clear who it was he was talking to. “You’ll forgive Vane, my dear child.” Here his eyes did turn to his horrified cabin boy, “He has not had the most cultured of upbringings, and his manners are coarse in nature. He is in utter ignorance when it comes to the ways of women of proper repute and education.” His hard expression melted off his face as he turned back to Eleanor, gesturing with hands that glittered with rings crowned with diamonds as big as Robins’ eggs, “Please, ignore him and do go on.”

 

“Oh, but he is right,” Eleanor sniffled, “Once I found myself trapped—caught—I panicked. I knew not what to do! The boat was already out at sea and once I beheld your cabin boy’s face—And I do mean no offense, but he has a most—Disagreeable countenance--”

 

“Not exactly how I’d put it,” Avery said in a low voice, “but I understand you.”

 

“I panicked. In my feminine,” this she spoke the word with blistering contempt, “hysteria I could think of no other means by which to guarantee my safety than—than--- than to fall to that most base of all sins, the wretched temptation of a lie!” She sniffled, “I told him I knew of a secret that I should only tell him were he to let me go.”

 

A fluffy red eyebrow went up on Avery’s face, “And do you know of any secrets, child?”

 

“No, sir,” The girl demurred in that small voice.

 

“Anything of your father?”

 

“No, sir.” She repeated. She turned her head from him then and gazed upon the wall, her lips trembling and her eyes shutting, “I am all but orphaned upon this Island. Upon my mother’s death, my father… He had so wished for a son, you see… And I… And I…” Tears brimmed her blue eyes.

 

At this point Vane sighed, resigned to the reality of his situation when both Avery and Jennings startled before the horror of a little girl on the verge of crying.

 

“Now, now, my dear—I’m sure, ah, I mean—Surely your father—And you, such a sweet child, why, anyone—“ Avery sputtered, almost leaning over his desk in trying to reach the girl to console her.

 

Vane shook his head when even the stalwart Jennings produced a fine silk handkerchief and took a knee before the girl, “Come now, lass, come now, it’s not like that at all, you see, it’s just there are some realities to this world, you see, that some men must face, you see, and when a man is put in the position of becoming a father he, well, you see…”

 

Vane simply stood there and watched this whole display with a grim sort of resignation. Jennings hummed and hawed and fidgeted and You-See’d himself into some bullshit that eventually meandered into ‘But all fathers love their children, even their daughters,’ Avery heard this and joined in a blustering agreement, saying any man would be proud to have such a _fine_ girl for a daughter, and Vane merely stood there and thought how much more preferable a flogging would be to having to watch this.

 

Vane had mercifully lost track of the conversation until its conclusion seemed to make an appearance by way of a small, hiccupped “R-really?” From the Guthrie demon.

 

“Really.” Jennings beamed. Avery smiled. Eleanor smiled. Vane died a little on the inside.

 

“Now.” Avery straightened himself up and wagged a finger towards the little girl, “No more deceptions now, eh?”

 

“Oh, most certainly not!”

 

The smile Eleanor flashed Vane had none of the sweetness of the one she’d flashed his superiors.

 

***

 

“She—She’s---“

 

“A woman of high birth.” Avery interrupted Vane offhandedly as he sorted through the papers on his desk. Vane had waited until Jennings had escorted the little Mephistophelean menace to make his case, and it well seemed that Avery had expected as such. But where, going by Avery’s performance, Vane had expected a thorough lecture on his conduct, Avery now seemed to have already brushed off the entire incident, “That’s how they all are, and frankly you should count yourself lucky to be ignorant of their ways.”

 

Avery looked up and saw Vane’s face and the baffled expression there. Avery’s smile was as amicable and indulgent as the one he’d shown Eleanor. This, for some reason, only made Vane feel worse, “Oh, do not take her to heart. Women like that are bred to be about as useful as fainting goats. One stiff breeze and they come entirely to pieces. They know little outside of sewing and hysteria.”

 

Avery put down his papers and regarded Vane with a hard, serious look, “You should be thankful to Rackham, has a keen eye for women, that one. You don’t wish to end up entangled with a woman of breeding and you’d do best to steer clear of that Guthrie child, I know those types well. From afar they may seem charming and even maybe even interesting so far as a challenge goes, but don’t be fooled, those types of women will use you for what they need and then just as easily turn on you without a moment of hesitation.”

 

Avery waved a hand through the air and returned to his papers, “Find yourself a good sturdy bar wench, those are the women for men like us. A woman who will give you a good solid fuck and won’t send you tearful letters begging you to return from sea. Leave the Guthrie child to whatever sniveling Lordling her father sells her off to, let them have their poetry and garden parties.”

 

Vane could not help himself, “And their Virginals, sir?”

 

Avery grinned, “You remember that, eh? Good Christ, but I do not miss my days in the Navy. Oh, the sea was grand and the battles spectacular, but once you returned to shore! Soon as some Lord heard of your exploits and took an interest in you, you were completely lost. The parties, the balls, recitals and symphonies.” His voice trailed off. There was a sadness in his eyes despite his words, as though he were seeing something play out before his eyes that was meant for him and him alone.

 

“Sir?”

 

Avery shook himself out of his daydream, “Yes, yes. Terribly dreadful. Terribly dreadful stuff.”

 

Avery’s amicable mood, however, was not enough. Vane needed to share the unbelievable story, how that thing, indeed, bred to be about as useful as a fainting goat, had downright assaulted him on the beach, blackmailed him, and then posed as the dainty little princess of Nassau to get one over his Captain.

 

“But sir, you don’t understand—“

 

“--I must say,” Avery interrupted him as though Vane had never said anything, “for a moment I was quite relieved. For one moment I had believed she did, indeed, know of a secret.” Avery sighed, dropped his papers onto the desk and looked back up to Vane. The grave and serious expression in his eyes was like nothing Vane had ever seen before, “Something I now realise I should have told you long ago, but I wasn’t sure you were ready to hear it.”

 

Vane frowned, “Sir?”

 

“Vane, the truth is… I am old.”

 

A silence stretched between the two.

 

“Well, don’t trip over yourself trying to deny it!” Avery said in mock indignation, a smile playing at his lips and then just as easily fading away. He sighed, “My time has come, and it is best I acknowledge it before our enemies could take advantage of a tottering old fool. Vane, I will simply come out and say it: I am retiring. On the morrow I will make the announcement of my retirement, the men will be given their option to stay or leave as they might, and announcements have already been sent calling for new recruits. I will need you, Vane, to help the transition go as smoothly as possible.”

 

Here Avery gave Vane some time to take all this information in. He was sure the boy had been knocked dumbstruck with the sheer honour of what Avery was proposing, for indeed Vane was just a cabin boy, and here Avery was giving him tactile proof of his importance to him and his crew, a proposal that would have flattered a seasoned first mate and was unheard of for such a young boy.

 

And yet Vane’s expression did not betray any particular sense of pride.

 

“Out of the question,” was his hard and brittle response.

 

Avery blinked, sure he must have misheard, not just for the words he thought he heard but the icy and hard tone with which they were said, “Pardon?”

 

Vane set his jaw firmly, his preternaturally bright eyes seeming to burn with a clear fire in his tawny face, “Wherever you go, I go.”

 

Avery sighed, “Vane—“

 

Vane’s steely control began to crack and give as surely as a damn that crumbles before a storming tide, “You gave me my freedom, my training. I am indebted to you as—“

 

“I am disappointed in you.”

 

“Disappointed?” Vane repeated, shocked. He could not hide the hurt and shock out of his voice for he was too startled by Avery’s response to even think. Here he’d offered his unrelenting loyalty to his Captain, to the man who gave him everything, to the man to whom he owed everything, and he was disappointed?

 

“I did not take you from your bondage only to replace your old shackles with new ones bound to me. I had thought to free you from your slavery.” Avery’s expression was grim, “It appears I was wrong. Maybe you would have been better served had I left you there.”

 

The sheer horror of Avery’s words struck Vane to the heart and he stared up at the older man with an open and hurt expression that was like an open wound across his young face, “Sir!”

“Maybe it is too late,” Avery sighed and went on, “the seeds of slavery have taken their root in you.”

 

Vane rushed towards the desk, slamming his hands down on top of the oaken surface with such force that Avery’s maps and ledgers and papers went flying into the air, “I am no one’s slave!”

 

Avery looked up from his chair and met Vane’s eyes with a cool intensity in his eyes, “Are you not? Then why do you believe yourself indebted to another man?”

 

Vane stared down but he had no response.

 

“Freedom is not something I or anyone else can give you,” Avery went on, “So long as you consider yourself indebted to anyone, you have made yourself a slave. If you want freedom, true freedom, you must take it for yourself, demand it of the world and make it your own. If you should follow in mine or anyone else’s shadow, you are still no better than you were when first I found you. Should you be content to spend the rest of your life as slave to others, then so be it. I will not get in your way, but I will not be party to it.”

 

A hard and living silence stretched between the man and the boy, so fraught with tension that the very air seemed to crackle between them. Avery stared up at Vane, Vane stared down at his Captain, the muscles in his arms jumping.

 

It was Avery who gave first, sighing once again in resignation and sitting back in his chair. His gaze lingered on those maps across his desk, scattered on the floor, and his eyes seemed to grow dim, distant, as though he were seeing things Vane could not conceive of, places he’d never that lived now only in his Captain’s memory.

 

“The world is changing, Vane, and I am a man grown old. I can no longer keep up with the changing tides.”

 

Avery’s eyes seemed to catch something on the floor. He leaned over and returned with a particularly aged leger. Age had browned its red cover, salt had eroded its pages. Upon the red cover there Vane spotted the flag of England, beneath it the coat of arms of its Royal Navy. Below the arms of the Navy there, once engraved in golden ink and now long since beginning to fade, was the inscription: _Henry Every, Sailing Master of the Royal Navy under His Most Royal Highness King James II, In the year of our God’s Grace 1660._ A rust coloured stain had exploded across the Naval inscription, a colour Vane well recognised as the faded evidence of what had once been dark crimson.

 

The look Avery gave this was bittersweet, “Myself, Jennings, Hornigold—we all are but fading relics of a world that will not exist for much longer. The rules we live by, the code that governs our lives, is quickly becoming outdated.”

 

Avery gave his old ledger one last look and shoved it into a drawer, slamming the drawer shut as though trying to shut out the very existence of that little book. The look he gave Vane was grim, “My people are dying, Vane. To alcohol, to illness, and worst of all, to old age. We belonged to the tradition set forth by men now dead for hundreds of years. Men who were born farmers, merchants, even lords and sailors, all who followed the route set by fate that lead them to the sea. But at the end of the day, we will always be those farmers and merchants, the sailor who retired once his family was fed, the lord who settled once his thirst for adventure was dully quenched. We all were united by the sea and the deep desire to escape our place for just a little while before we took back to the plow or the desk, where we truly belong.”

 

For one moment Vane stared in open disbelief. He would always remember the day he had first laid his eyes upon Captain Henry Avery, how even in his rather small size Avery had towered over him as only something larger than human life itself could. These things of which Avery talked about—Retirement, age, death—to Vane, they were nigh incomprehensible in regards to this man, this great man, this man who was not a man and not a God, but a thing, a force of nature larger than life and human comprehension, as capable of death or retirement as a hurricane was capable of restoring a ship from the bottom of the ocean and returning it safe and untouched to port. The overall effect was that Avery’s words fell as nonsense to Vane.

 

When Avery smiled, Vane halfway expected him to begin laughing in that way of his, to pat him on the back and say it had all been some macabre joke. But Avery did not laugh, his eyes focused on Vane as though he stared at him but could not see him, as though he saw something else entirely standing in Vane’s place. “Now there has come a new tide, and it’s brought with it a new generation. Men like you, like Rackham and Bonny, you do not belong to our old traditions. You were not born to a plow nor raised at a desk.”

 

Vane swallowed, and found he could not speak.

 

Avery went on, “It is both your gift and your curse that you know nothing of the world beyond the sea—no, that’s not quite right. You could never be a common sailor nor merchant. You are something else entirely, something new that I cannot fully understand.” Avery shook his head as though he were trying to make sense of something, “Your first taste of freedom came upon this ship—yes,” Avery’s face twisted as though he’d tasted something bitter, “this _pirate_ ship. And it was onboard this pirate ship that the man who stands before me was born from the husk of a slave. You are no different than Rackham and Bonny, all of you mere children born of a ship and the ocean. Piracy is as much as part of your nature as the air you breathe.”

 

“No,” Avery sighed, “you are not like me. Everything I know about this calling I had to learn well into my life. You learned to be a pirate as I learned to eat food for my nourishment. I am a pirate because every other choice was robbed from me, taken from my hands until I was left with no other option. But you are a pirate because you cannot be anything else. Because you are not anything else.”

 

At those words, Vane felt a deep, yawning disappointment break within him, as though he’d just woken from a glorious dream to find out it was, indeed, just a dream, “You do me a great honour,” he started and there was a defeat in his voice that startled Avery, “but you forget that I have been a pirate but for little over two years. If your words ring true then I am damned to be a slave for that is where I was raised.”

 

Avery nodded in agreement and Vane’s spirits sank further at what he took to be a confirmation of his worst fears, “Should you find your life devoid of route without me or anyone else’s guidance,” Avery said, “you’d be right, and the seas would be all the lesser for it. You would, indeed, have become a slave for so long as you should live.”

 

Avery smiled with a pride Vane could not recognise, a look that was entirely foreign to him but a look that any other person brought up among the cares and values of civilised society might have recognised as paternal, “But I tell you,” Vane perked up at the encouraging and warm tone of Avery’s voice, “I was not in the business of bringing slaves into my crew. And the child I found but two years ago may have had the marks of a driver’s lash on his back and a brand on his heart, but that child was no slave. That child bore the marks of one who would fight for freedom until his last breath. Were he a slave, he never would have found himself on the deck of some ship headed away from his prison even while his back still bled from the last crime he’d committed.”

 

“I found a fighter. And I saw him be born anew as a pirate. As I retire now, so too shall Jennings, and even old Hornigold, one day return to their rightful places away from the ocean. But you do not have that freedom. You can no more retire from piracy than I can retire from being a man. And that is why I need you now.”

 

Vane’s expression was grim, “I thought I was to be left behind to dwell among my own kind, this new generation that has ousted you and yours?” He spat.

 

Avery laughed, the first familiar sound Vane had heard since this utterly unnatural turn of conversation, “There it is, boy. There he is. That is the boy I brought into my crew, and that is exactly who I need.”

 

“Vane, I need of you a favour. Not an order from a captain to his crew, not a debt to be paid to a man from spared another from servitude. What I need from you is a favour, as one man to another.”

 

This idea was utterly unheard of to Vane. “What would you have of me?”

 

“I am retiring because I am resigned to my fate and my place in the world.” He shrugged then and smiled, shaking his head in amused resignation, “Jennings, however, sees things quite differently. He still has the taste of the sea in his heart and believes his adventures are not yet complete.”

 

Vane frowned, “You would have me persuade him into following you?”

 

“Fuck, no!” Avery laughed, “I’ve had enough of that hawk-nosed prick and his damnable condescending stares!” The edges of his lips softened, “But he is a hawk-nosed and condescending prick to whom I owe much in life, and I would not leave him to be swept away in the coming tide without a lifeline. I wish you to be that lifeline, Vane.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“I had spoken to Jennings of my retirement, and word has already been sent to Port Royal. Three captains are on their way as we speak to offer the men of the _Fancy_ positions of good rank among their fleets. With them comes a sloop by the name of the _Diamond_ that is in need of a new Captain. Guthrie has already agreed to take on Jennings as a client, and now Jennings is in need of a crew.” Avery fixed upon Vane a stare that was at once grave and searching, as though he were observing him for any sign of a reaction, “You would do a great favour to me were you to accept position as Quartermaster to Jennings.”

 

Vane could only stare in silence, for he was indeed sure that he must have mis-heard. But it was the grave look upon his Captain’s face, the searching look in his eyes, that pressed upon Vane the reality that he had not, in fact, misheard. “Quartermaster?” He finally managed, “But sir, I am only—“

 

Avery waved a jeweled hand in the air, “Spare me your age, it makes no difference to me. You are already older than most of the men on this crew. Hell, sometimes I believe you to be older than me. Your age will be of no importance.”

 

Vane’s mind was reeling, “Should I—Will I—“

 

Avery laughed again, “I must admit, I am somewhat shocked. You’ve always been the silent time, but this is the first time I have seen you speechless.”

 

Finally, only one sentence was left to him, one question of whose answer he could not fathom, “But why me, sir?”

 

Avery’s lips twisted into a smirk that was entirely devoid of mirth, “For you know better than anyone else on this ship what it is the men stand to lose should anything go wrong. For them, freedom means only the ability to do whatever it is they wish, whenever they wish it. The Spanish, the French, the Navy, there the men see only the thrill of battle, the potential glory of a quick death in combat.” His eyes were bright as though he could see right through the boy where he stood, “You, on the other hand, know better. You know the value of victory for you know the price of defeat doesn’t come at the quick swipe of a cutlass or the blast of a musket. And you’re just enough of a hard-ass to make the men see it too, whether they want to or not.”

 

Vane stood, stupefied into silence, “What am I to say?”

 

There was a light in Avery’s eyes like that of a predator sensing his prey whose prey was so close he could nigh well smell it, “Say you will do it.”

 

“Should Jennings be in here for this?”

 

“He already knows, and he thinks it a fine idea. He’s seen how you took to those books and that cutlass at your side. We both thought it best that I be the one to approach you on the matter.”

 

A silence.

 

Avery’s brow went up, “You hesitate?”

 

Vane took a deep breath and met his Captain’s eyes with a tilt of his chin and a hard look he took to be professional, “I would have a demand.”

 

Avery smiled indulgently, “Being?”

 

“I would have Rackham and Bonny on the crew as well.”

 

Avery laughed that bark of a sound, “I never thought he’d do it, but I do believe Rackham managed to make something of a friend in you!”

 

“I have no patience for gossip among men, but should I ever be in need of information, Rackham makes it his business to know everyone else’s business. There is use in a man that can’t shut up.”

 

Avery’s eyes twinkled and he did not try to pretend he believed Vane’s explanation for one moment, “And I suppose Bonny is because of the whole package?”

 

“When a fight should come, there is no man I would rather have by my side with a gun in their hand than Bonny.”

 

Avery leaned back on his chair with a satisfied glow, “I don’t see why it should be an issue.”

 

His smile widened and Avery rose from behind his desk and walked to Vane, reaching out his hand. The final red light of the sun caught the diamonds in Avery’s fingers and made his hand glow in a vivid, blood red light, “Congratulations, Quartermaster.”

 

Vane’s heart was racing in a way he had never felt before, and he had to fight to keep his expression as serene and detached as he could, for that is what he thought a ranking officer must do. Vane reached out and took Avery’s hand, “Captain.”

 

***

 

A wave crashed upon the shore with the roar of the night tide. Vane sat on the sand at the edge of the shore, his unseeing gaze fixed upon that dark point of the horizon where the inky night sea and the dark velvet night sky seemed to blend into one. He never saw the distant flash of light that seemed to make his eyes glow.

 

Vane was lost, haunted by his own memories. Even here, in this secluded beach that was nestled between two massive rock formations, Eleanor Guthrie still managed to hound him. He thought the girl mad when she said he’d wanted to be Captain. Now here he was. At sixteen he was Quartermaster. When had any of this happened? Was he not a slave on a forgotten Island? An abandoned street child with no name and no father? How was he now sitting on that beach, a world away from the place of his birth, and a title to his name?

 

Vane leaned back and found something that poked him uncomfortably at his side. He fished in his pocket for the culprit and found there the one thing he had from his old life, the one witness to the strange turns his fate had lead him.

 

Under the heavy moon, the Spanish coin in his hand seemed to glow with a silver light. It was the one thing, the only thing, no one had ever been able to take from him. When heat, starvation and fever had driven him to the brink of madness, when he’d laid on the dirt floor in the middle of the jungle and death called to him, this coin was the only thing that had reminded him who he was, where he had come from.

 

He was to be a Quartermaster.

 

Vane took the coin and flipped it through the air. With each flip and flash of light, Vane could see the flash of gold, of red, of orange, of snow on the ground, of a house on fire, snow on the wind, fire embers in the air, a little boy helpless and useless and unwanted.

Vane plucked the coin from the air. A born pirate, Avery had called him. In two years he had gone from slave to Quartermaster of a crew. Should he truly one day like to be a Captain?

 

He would always remember when first he had met Captain Avery, standing on that besieged vessel. Everyone in his life had wanted something from him and never had he thought to ask for anything in return. When Avery had taken Vane among his crew, he had been the first to give Vane something back—His freedom, and a purpose.

 

Suppose, he thought, that he should be Captain. He would find other men as Avery had found him, Vane thought with certainty. He would offer them freedom—the freedom that had been denied him. He would make for them a home among those who also knew what it was like to have nothing. And what should they want? Money? Gold? Adventures? Glory? All of it, he thought. They would want all of it. And they would get it, too. He would make sure of that. His men would never know what it is to be denied as he had been.

 

What sort of Captain should he be? Would he be as great as Avery?

 

Vane thought then of those men of the Ivory Coast. The men whom Avery had befriended, laughed with. The men whom Avery had locked in chains and sold as cattle, as someone had done to him once. He thought of the man by the name of Guthrie, of that pompous and revolting class of men that had been as rampant in England as rats on a ship. He thought of how Avery had dressed up for Guthrie, assumed his old Navy woolens as a woman might don a dress to impress a man come courting. How Avery had welcomed that man to his ship and basically begged for the privilege of giving Guthrie money.

 

No, Vane thought. He should not be like Avery.

 

He would be better.

 

For one moment, Vane allowed to lose himself in silence. His thoughts cleared until his mind was nothing more than the roar of waves as they crashed against the shore and pulled away, the echoes of the ocean’s song bouncing between the two cliffs beside him.

 

“How did you know?”

 

“Excuse me?” Came a shocked voice from behind him.

 

Vane looked over his shoulder, “You said I wanted to be Captain. How could you have possibly know that when I myself didn’t?”

 

Eleanor Guthrie stood just behind him, her pale hair and dress glowing in the moonlight. She was half hidden under a nearby rock and her expression made it clear she had not expected him to be aware of her presence, and Vane allowed himself to enjoy knowing he could get at least one over his little tormentor.

 

The girl pouted, her mood clearly fouled at having been caught, “Well, for one, it was written clear as day on your face. As to why you didn’t know it, well, maybe you’re not particularly clever.”

 

In clear defiance of her wishes to annoy him, Vane only seemed to shrug. He fell back on the sand and sighed, “If you were wrong I would have killed you on this beach long ago. Suppose there is some truth to what you say.”

 

Eleanor huffed, feeling somewhat defeated when he didn’t retaliate or become angry, when that fire didn’t seep into his eyes and he didn’t jump to his feet and hurl threats at her. Eleanor had never particularly liked being ignored, and had long learned how to demand attention for herself, one way or the other. That the indolent teenager seemed to completely ignore her despite her efforts irked her mightily.

 

Vane simply lay there on the sand, his arms crossed behind his head, his unusually bright eyes taking on the grey light of the moon above them. He turned those peculiar eyes to her then and regarded her with an intensity that made Eleanor strangely uncomfortable.

 

Hours ago, Vane had been tormented by the very same Island rodent that he now stared at. She had aroused in him a curious feeling that had threatened to drive him mad with its strange and mysterious nature. Now he had come to understand what it was that had so haunted him, he now knew the identity of the evasive words to describe the strange feeling that had overwhelmed him.

 

Though he was sixteen years old, Avery had said Vane was older than any men on the crew, older even than Avery himself. And when Avery had said it, Vane had found nothing particularly peculiar in the man’s words, for he had only acknowledged what Vane himself had always felt.

 

But that girl had made him feel sixteen years old.

 

Something in her challenge and her laughter, something about the unhesitating manner in which she approached him as a child might approach another to ask for a game and pushed him and nagged at him until he played her game. For the first time that he could remember, he had been made to feel like a boy, a child.

 

That was the peculiar feeling that had overcome him at the beach, the bizarre nature that had stripped him of any sort of genuine bloodthirst.

 

Eleanor Guthrie had made him feel like a normal boy.

 

As he did not know what to make of this, he told himself he hated her for it.

 

“Tell me, honestly, why me?” He sighed, and his was the sullen tone that was all too natural to sixteen year old boys across the globe, and yet had been utterly alien to Charles Vane before he first stepped foot onto Nassau’s shores.

 

The girl shrugged, “Because you of all men on this Island find it so terribly important that I should fear you.”

 

Vane smirked, a sardonic and cruel twist of his lips, “And yet you would go so far out of your way to deny me but that one simple pleasure,” He sighed in defeat, letting his head fall back onto the sand. He stared up at the wide purple expanse of the Caribbean night above them, trying to recreate a mental map of the stars above him as as had been his habit whenever circumstances around him had conspired to irritate his every nerve, and yet he found he could not, for still his spirit remained unsettled, obsessing as it was on things that made no sense to him.

 

He turned his head in the sand and stared at her then, his face grown serious as he regarded the small child where she sat on the sand behind him. Her white dress and fair hair appeared to glow in the moonlight, giving her the air of bewitched little imp, “Why, though? To what possible purpose have you tormented me?”

 

The girl blinked those wide blue eyes at him, “The truth?”

 

Vane sighed, fighting back a sarcastic response, “The truth.”

 

There was a long and silent pause. The black waves of the night tide crashed before them. The wind carried the laughter of men and the smell of rum and smoke. In the far distance a seagull cried.

 

Finally, Eleanor spoke. “Whether you want to hear it or not?”

 

He groaned, “Should you tell me you were an agent of hell set upon tormenting me to the very soul I would have no problems taking that for truth!”

 

“Well,” Eleanor chirped in that high and girlish voice she’d used to bewitch his Captain, “it’s not that.”

 

“Then what _is it_?” He growled through clenched teeth.

 

There grew between them a long pause such that Vane soon found himself growing increasingly anxious for the girl’s response.

 

Finally she spoke, her chest huffing in indignation, her voice quick and petulant, “Mr. Scott has been occupied with my father, Max is always busy cleaning up after the mess you people made, and old Hornigold has nothing for me to do.” She said with a burning indignation as though all this were some grand injustice done unto her.

 

Vane stared.

 

He spoke slowly, his words drawn out as though he were speaking through the processes in his mind which reeled to make sense out of the girl’s revelation,“…You mean to tell me that you have persecuted and harassed me, might have even caused me to be flogged were my captain so inclined… Because you were bored?”

 

Eleanor Guthrie at least had the common decency to look away then, tracing errant patterns in the sand with her small finger. “Well, when you put it that way I suppose it does sound kind of bad.”

 

“ _How else am I to put it_?”

 

“Well—“ She stopped when she realised she had no response to this.

 

Vane sighed, “Why didn’t you turn away in revulsion when you saw me? Run in fear? Demanded my head from my captain? I don’t understand you. So often you could have destroyed me, why didn’t you?” He had wanted to destroy her, and yet he hadn’t. Maybe once more she could see into his soul, once more put into words those things he could not understand of himself.

 

“Because you’ve never once tried to fuck me.” She said, and in her voice there rang a cold note of detachment that seemed somewhat disconcerting from a voice so young and bright.

 

He thought then of when he’d first seen the girl, so carefree among the camps at the shore. And he remembered still how quickly she had responded to his advance, how unusually effective she’d been in falling him, the expert skill she’d shown in being able to run herself to safety. It occurred to him then that she could have run much further, but she hadn’t wanted to. She had stayed.

 

Foolish, foolish girl, he thought.

 

Vane sighed, stretching his legs in the sand lazily. “Has it occurred to you that maybe you’re not my type?”

 

“Oh, please.” Eleanor scoffed, “Look at me.”

 

He yawned. “If I wanted scrawny and flat chested I’d fuck Rackham.”

 

She thought about this and sighed, nodding her head in a grave understanding he didn’t like for one moment. “I suppose it does get lonely out at sea.”

 

Vane began to once more feel that throbbing pain behind his eyes, “Not what I meant.”

 

“I’m not one to judge,”

 

“I _never_ —“

 

“I mean honestly it would explain—“

 

Vane rubbed his eyes, the pounding he felt there he was quickly coming to accept as a natural byproduct of the little hellion’s presence, “How would you feel if I left you out at sea?”

 

“Remind me, how did that work out for you last time?”

 

Vane turned to fix a glare on the child as though maybe, just maybe, if he really believed it in, he could actually glare the girl out of existence.

 

She, instead, merely smiled. “What is your name?”

 

“You heard my Captain. My name is Vane.”

 

The girl shook her head, “I heard Rackham call you Charles. I shall call you Charles.”

 

“Isn’t there a may I you’re forgetting?”

 

“I need no one’s permission to do as I please.”

 

Vane’s brow rose in his sun-darkened face, “If I were to forbid you, would that stop you any?”

 

“Not in the least.”

 

“I figured as much. So it’s only fair that I should call you—“ He stopped, for though he knew well the girl’s name, he had become so accustomed to ascribing to her some demonic or otherworldly counterpart he actually had to think upon it.

 

The Guthrie child scoffed in indignation, “Oh, really? You can’t recall my name?”

 

Vane smiled in triumph then when he heard the clear irritation in the girl’s voice. “I’ve had no trouble making myself understood by simply referring you as ‘the pest.’”

 

“Well that is not my name.”

 

“Then what is it?”

 

“Eleanor.”

 

“Eleanor.” He repeated.

 

A silence.

 

“Pest suits you better.”

 

***

 

The air inside Guthrie’s room was stagnant under the press of a hot and balmy Caribbean morning. If the heat bothered the men that had poured onto Nassau’s streets, they did a brave job of hiding it, their laughter and song, screams and yells pouring through the open windows. As Avery had said, his announcements had been made, word had spread, and now the streets of Nassau throbbed with every cut-throat and lowlife that had managed to earn the ire of Tortuga and Port Royal and now sought a quick way to riches.

 

From beyond the window there was the distinct sounds of a crash and a yell, the shot of a musket. Music stopped, a silence, and then the roar of laughter and noise swelled up from the streets outside the window once more as easily as though nothing had happened.

 

It was clear the room Noonan had arranged for Guthrie and his unusual guests had not been used to visitors. Where other entrepreneurs might have found some money to be made in a corner room that boasted tall shuttered windows on two of its walls, Noonan in his never ending supply of intelligence had only seen an office in an Island full of illiterates. The scarce and salt stripped furniture had only hastily been dusted, the plaster walls, painted in a garish shade of orange, still boasted their share of bullet holes and ill-scrubbed blood stains, and the table that had been dragged up from the dining room had to be hidden under re-purposed curtains in order to hide decades of abuse.

 

Vane leaned against the wall and stared out the window forlornly. That whole morning he’d had to keep telling himself that he should be honoured to be where he was, as opposed to down there on the streets. He was the only man of the crew to receive the invitation from Avery, who said his presence would prove to be a beneficial learning exercise. When the sounds of another brawl broke through, Vane found honour decidedly lacked the fun of a good bar fight.

 

His company was presently sitting around the old, salt eaten table, nine men in all. The windless room reeked of pipe smoke and the various archaic ointments old men were known to use for their ailing bodies, and Vane was all too keenly aware of the fact that he must have been the youngest man there by a stretch of what must have easily been thirty years, but felt like eighty.

 

They were laughing and chatting amiably, Avery’s laugh rolling every now and then, and the room was filled with the clinks and chimes of rough hewn pewter on cracked and stained china. To stare at them as Vane did now, one would never guess these men seated at the table, with their receding hairlines and their crows footed eyes, their liver spots and their constant complaints of ailments, were among the most feared and wretched men on the seas.

 

Like an infection, Richard Guthrie could always be counted on to be there, whether one wanted him or not. Sitting at the head of the table, he wore his usual effete fripperies, this time he boasted a particularly foppish selection of green velvet fit to burst with gold trim, and this he topped with the curled periwig that made him vaguely resemble a woman’s pet spaniel with its long curly ears dangling by the sides of his head. In his present company, his outfit gave him the effect of a little boy who had stumbled upon his father’s wardrobe and decided to give it a go.

 

Beside him there sat the governor of Hispanola, a man by the name of Eduardo Goncaves de la Paz who had, before the war with France, been described as a bloodthirsty oaf and enemy to all Englishmen, but who, after the declaration of said war, had become known as a jovial and hospitable sort of fellow on whom any Englishman could depend on. Beside him was the aging Amaro Pargo, Captain of the _Estrella Mar_. He did not bother to cover his baldness with a wig, and seemed to wear his advancing years with pride. Pargo was renowned as Spain’s most formidable weapon, a proud Corsair under the Spanish King, and was said to have decimated several English warships by feigning surrender only to draw the ships near enough to guarantee a brutal and bloody victory for his men. It was said his wealth in stolen loot easily surpassed that of the Spanish King, and that his body count had tolled in the thousands, his hands so stained with English blood they were reputed to glow red in an Englishman’s presence.

 

At present, Pargo was lost in a story about a catastrophic monsoon season in Spain that had nearly destroyed his extensive vineyards in Geneto and halved his profit margin for that season.

 

There sat, ofcourse, Jennings and Avery, neither of which had bothered with their Navy fripperies this time around and both of who looked downright juvenile compared to their company. And beside them there sat Diedrick Van Fisser, the red faced and bulging bellied governor of Curacao, and his octo-generian escort, Laurens Prins, the retired Captain of the _Gouden Leeuw_ and Commodore of the Dutch privateers _._ Once Prins had been reputed to take a Spanish Fort on the Main with nothing but six men and a canoe. When word had reached Port Royal that Prins had beheaded a priest and sent his head in a box to the Spanish King, demanding a ransom of 70,000 _pesos_ for the priest’s body, Prins had been banned from Port Royal and Tortuga both, and no port would accept the bloodthirsty monster.

 

Now when Prins was not falling asleep or staring at his curled and arthritis-knobbed hands, he was only too happy to share stories of his great-granchildren, all nine of which he boasted to be exceptionally talented.

 

Next to him was seated the Governor of Jamaica, a man any Englishman would recognise as Peter Blood, once Captain Peter Blood of the _Arabella_. Maybe it was for this reason that Blood did not bring his own Captain with him, for he was enough to stand in for both Governor and Captain. His was the only presence that could give Vane pause, for Blood’s first mate’s accounts of his tenure as Captain of the _Arabella_ had been one of Vane’s most studied pieces of work while on the _Fancy_. It was hard to conceive of this man who had grown so much larger than life as merely sitting there, his thick black hair now dusted with grey, his expression grown heavy and sleepy. But Vane could well feel a thrill when he caught a look at his eyes, as blue and unnaturally bright as Jeremy Pitt had taken great pains to describe. He could remember Pitt’s accounts of the man’s unnerving bravery. How this man had once tricked a Spanish Captain out of his own ship. How he’d taken a man and tied him down to a cannon, his face to the sun, his back to the metal and his legs straddling the muzzle. The man had died then and there out of sheer fear.

 

And yet all Blood could talk about was his young daughter. Her precious face, so like her mother’s. Her beautiful eyes, so like her mother’s. Her precocious nature, so like her mother’s.

Of the men seated at the table, only one seemed reluctant to join in the revelries. Hornigold, too, was there, and he stared at Pargo and Prins and their respective governors as though their very presence caused the air to become imbued with a foul stench. Unlike Jennings and Avery, he had clearly taken great pains to squeeze his aging body into his old uniform of His Majesty’s Navy, his medals displayed on his chest like proud figureheads at the prow of a ship.

 

Vane had taken his post by the window after realizing that there was little chance the conversation at the table would move from the subjects of wives, mistresses, daughters, sons, and grandchildren any time soon. They talked of gout and of pains, of joints that ached and parts that did not work, of construction projects and manors they planned. Ultimately the effect was that Vane’s disillusion on finding these men of legends to be no different than any other gaggle of tottering old fools had fouled his mood.

 

There was a loud and repeated clinking of pewter on porcelain. The Spaniard Amaro Pargo stood in his place, his jovial and swarthy face red with rum and laughter, “Here’s to you protestant heathens! May hell burn too hot for the mosquitoes to follow you down!”

 

There was a roar of laughter. Avery raised his glass, “Here’s to you, you papist cocksucking bastard. May your pagan saints help you in the afterlife, for God knows you’ll need it, Pargo.”

 

Another round of laughter. All but one man seemed to be taking this exchange in good humour. While the men laughed and patted each other on the back, Hornigold had the distinct expression of a man who had just bit into something foul.

 

“I fear my saints may be too busy to help anyone out at this moment, I’m afraid.” Pargo smiled, but his eyes were bright, “The French have been doing their best to keep even the most patient holy soul well occupied.”

 

There was a solid murmur of agreement around the table, the laughter and merriment dying under the rumbles of ‘hear, hear.’

 

“Mayhaps,” and here there was the familiar and bored drawl of Richard Guthrie, “We should strive to help unburden those saints of yours. Maybe the time has come to start taking the French matter into our own hands.”

 

“Ah,” Governor De la Paz sat down in his chair, his smile vicious and hungry like that of a serpent, “the real reason for our invitation makes itself known!”

 

Guthrie laughed, “You do me an injustice, Governor Paz. Can I not invite you fine gentlemen for the pleasure of your company?”

 

“You? No.” Was Paz’s response, and the table roared with laughter.

 

“The last time the English invited the Spanish for the pleasure of their company,” came Hornigold’s voice, “The Spanish Armada ended up at the bottom of the sea.”

 

“By the mercy of a freak storm and a witch of a Queen, if I remember my studies right.” Pargo’s voice, once warm and friendly, was now as cold and hard as a steel blade. A dark brow rose in his face, “Should the English be so lucky now, without their sorceress Queen to spread her legs in exchange for a navy of pirates?”

 

Vane’s interest perked up, if not for the turn of the conversation at the table, then for the bloodlust that now seemed to hover over the room like a dark fog. A tense and pregnant silence befell the room, and Vane could see Hornigold’s hand hover at his waist where his musket should have been. Englishman glared at Spaniard, Spaniard glared at Englishman. Only the Dutch Fisser and Prins seemed to watch without having a particular side, like the vulture who looks upon the battle scene and waits to see who will fall first. Now Vane understood why Guthrie’s manservant had waited at the door to collect all weapons.

 

It was that very same Guthrie’s voice who rang out in laughter, shattering the silence like glass, “I did not know we had such a fine company of historical scholars today! Now, stop me if you’ve heard this one. How do you confuse a Frenchman? Why, you put a musket in his hands and ask him to shoot!”

 

Throughout the table, there were dry and brittle coughs of laughter.

 

“Since we have such scholars of history, I wonder if you could try and explain this one to me. I did try to study French history once upon a time, but I found it to be too confusing. You see, an Englishman will aid his friends and attack his enemies. A Spaniard would rescue his friends and destroy their enemies. But a Frenchman will turn on his friends and surrender to their enemies!”

 

The sparse and repressed chuckles now became a roar of laughter. Men who had just moments ago been glaring at one another were now holding their stomachs or patting each other on the back with laughter. It was only Hornigold who did not laugh, his face red as he glared down at his plate.

 

“Is that the argument you have to persuade us in pursuing the French fleet, Guthrie?” Pargo laughed.

 

“The French Fleet!” Guthrie gasped, splaying a hand to his chest, “You confuse me for a madman!”

 

“Not a madman,” the elderly Prins croaked, “Merely a man who has never stood at the helm of a ship, Mister Guthrie.”

 

Guthrie nodded, “Quite right, sir, quite right. I know nothing of ships, or of battles at sea. So I suppose that is why I know not to suggest either.”

 

Pargo frowned, “Then what do you suggest?”

 

“A raid upon the city of Fort-Royal in Martinique,” Jennings responded, “The French fleet has been called away to battle, and the city has been left practically defenseless. Their storehouses have sugar, cacao and spices, and their fort is ripe for looting—cannons, arms, ammunition. More than enough to resupply our ships five times over.”

 

The men listened attentively, but it was Hornigold who shook his head.

 

“An ambitious project, to be sure, but with this new blasted Navigation Act, we’ll have the English navy as well as the French navy to contend with.”

 

There was an almost tangible dampening of the mood in the room.

 

“Might they be… persuaded to look the other way?” Guthrie asked.

 

It was Blood who shook his head, “They’ve been bribed too long, and they’ve grown greedy.”

 

Guthrie frowned, “Surely as Governor you could find some way to at least threaten them?”

 

Once again, Blood, the man whose accounts had robbed Vane of countless nights, the man who had stood above all other Captains as a sort of mythical creature of the sea, simply shook his head in defeat, “The Navigation Act has made them grow bold. They cannot be held accountable to our laws and do not even respect our authority in our own lands. They cannot be held to trial and they cannot be imprisoned. At best they are shipped back off to England where they get off with a mild warning and large pension.”

 

“We could get Spain to sponsor us, give us our letters of marque?” Jennings made it a question.

 

De la Paz shook his head, “Spain will never fund an English excursion, our Emperor is a halfwit and his advisors can still too well remember the insults of Blood and Morgan.” He looked to Jamaica’s governor then and gave him a shrug, “No offense.”

 

Blood smiled as though he might bear fangs, “None taken.”

 

There was another long silence. Guthrie opened his mouth to speak, but it was Vane who interrupted from his perch by the window, “…Why should the English Navy deter us?”

 

For one moment the men stared at him as though he had sprouted a second head from his shoulder, and then there was a roar of laughter.

 

Vane felt the blood rush to his face, his eyes flashing as he balled his fists at his side, “Our ships—“

 

“—Our ships, boy, are merely dinghies compared to the warships of the Navy.” Hornigold laughed.

 

Vane had to put in an almost physical effort to keep his rage from spilling into his voice, “If the English Navy is chasing after the French, their best ships will be too busy to care for any pirates that may pass by. Their warships are heavy and slow and we---“

 

And suddenly, all the laughter had drained from the room. Vane was all too keenly aware of how all eyes on the room were suddenly on him.

 

“And we _privateers_ , boy,” Came Hornigold’s brittle voice, “are no match for the King’s Navy.”

 

“We do not act out of self service, lad.” Here was Blood’s characteristic Irish brogue, “We are merely an extension of the English government, and it is for this reason that we are able to live under the support and protection of the English navy.”

 

Vane met Blood’s bright eyes, looking in there for any shadow of the man who had been like a hero out of a Greek myth to him, “What if we didn’t need their support, or protection?”

 

The men stared at Vane as though he had just started speaking in languages. Vane walked towards the table with purpose, “Have we not able men? Have we not working arms?”

 

“The boy makes a point!” De la Paz said, “Why, look at all we have!” And here a hard and mean light crept into his eyes, “A bunch of old men and an Island full of Convicts, runaways and pilfered weapons.” He spat and the men laughed.

 

“And whores, don’t forget the whores!” Pargo added without the slightest inclination to help, and the men only laughed harder.”

 

“Maybe we can send in some of the Quakers from the island, stock them in each and every ship.” Guthrie laughed, “Should the Navy ever stop us, we can simply send over one of their preachers and have them sermon the fleet to death.”

 

“One diatribe on the evils of the flesh alone and you’d have sailors jumping into the open mouths of sharks just to be spared.” The Catholic Pargo added.

 

The room swelled with more laughter than the streets. The sound rolled around Vane like a rising tide, swelling and churning until it overtook him, pulled him under until he no longer seemed to exist. Vane was ignored. It was Jennings who, still chuckling to himself, got to his feet and went to Vane, “Come lad.”

 

The laughter and merriment was such that nobody even noticed when Jennings led Vane out of the room.

 

Jennings returned alone, “I apologise. Ambition can too often be read as arrogance among the young.”

 

Guthrie finally calmed himself. “Don’t worry, I envy the boy his idealism. To take on the English Navy, now that does require some imagination!”

 

“Not as much as you might think!” Pargo laughed and the men joined in with him.

 

“I am happy to say we need not worry about going so far as declaring war on England as our young friend would suggest.” Guthrie filled his pewter mug with a fine imported whiskey, ignoring the Rum the other men had been drinking, “It just so happens that I have of my acquaintance a gentleman of good breeding and equally good standing in the English parliament. He has shown some interest in acting as a sponsor on such excursions, and has as much a desire to see the French fleet thwarted as any Englishman. He has agreed to profiler for us letters of marque against the French, making the whole arrangement entirely legal.”

 

A dark brow rose in Pargo’s face, “This he does for his hatred of the French alone?”

 

Guthrie wagged a finger in a way that made Pargo vaguely wish to chop it off, “You underestimate the rivalry between we Englishmen and out continental rivals. Furthermore, the prospect of receiving a portion of the earnings does help flame his anti French sentiments.”

 

“I tell you, this whole nonsense with the French will be done here soon enough, and then we can all get back to more important matters.” Hornigold glared at the Spaniards and was as thoroughly ignored as the young Vane had been.

 

“And so, before all you gentlemen may see about making all this official as Brethren of the Coast, may I ask how many of you are in agreement so I can see about procuring the necessary letters of marque?”

 

***

 

Laughter above him, laughter around him, and yet when Vane stepped foot into the merciless and windless noon day it seemed like he was the only one on the Island who was not laughing. His nerves were on edge, and for a moment he toyed with the idea of stepping into the tavern for the mere purpose of picking out a fight. Instead, he found himself leaning against the white plaster wall, staring up at the cloudless blue sky.

 

“Here,” a voice next to him said, “You look like you need this.”

 

Vane looked down and found a man, maybe five or six years older than he, standing next to him. His features were hard, high cheekbones and wide jawed. He wore no shirt from the breeches up, his chest and arms being riddled with the pink and uneven flesh of scar wounds. To Vane he held out a small and thin brown instrument.

 

Vane frowned, “What is it?”

 

“ _Cigarillo_.” The man responded, “Took them off a Spaniard a couple months back. Best thing on a bad day next to a good fuck.”

 

Vane shrugged and obliged the man, following in his example as he lit one end of fire and brought it to his mouth.

 

“Your Captain in there?” The man asked.

 

Vane nodded, “Yours?”

 

The man nodded. His English was pure, lacking any particular kind of foreign accent, but having about it the distinct drawl Vane vaguely remembered as being from the Northern provinces.

 

“What are you?” Vane asked,

 

“Gunners mate, fresh arrived from Tortuga. You?”

 

“Quartermaster.”

 

And here the man’s head swung around. His wide, clear blue eyes regarded Vane in clear disbelief, and then he roared with the laughter that Vane had heard one too many times that day.

 

“You?” He laughed harder, “Scrawny little short arse like you? Quartermaster? What are you, seven? Your bollocks ain’t even dropped yet, fer fuck’s sakes.”

 

And so it was that the man gave Vane the one thing he wanted more than anything else that day.

 

Before the Cigarillo had even dropped to the ground, Vane had drawn his cutlass and was lunging for the man. In that one moment every ounce of rage, of indignation, of hatred seemed to pour out of him. He swung wildly, madly, with a frenetic energy that seemed almost electric.

 

The man only seemed vaguely amused as Vane swung for him again and again, and again and again he just seemed to miss by mere centimetres. This only spurned him forward and he kept diving, swinging. Eventually the man drew his own cutlass, and even he had to struggle to block the boy’s wild and animalistic swings, so that soon he was finding himself stepping back.

 

Finally, he stopped. To the onlooker, it looked like the boy had merely worn himself out, panting and heaving as he was on the hot yellow day, sweat pouring down his face.

 

His nameless opponent stared down at him, equally tired, but still smiling. “Tell you what, boy. You have no real training but—“

 

He stopped then, his clear eyes going wide in shock. Vane smiled, still panting for air.

 

He saw as the man reached a hand to his face. Watched as he stared down in shock at the hand that came away stained with blood.

 

The man stared at Vane in open shock as blood poured down his face from a cut that stretched from next to his nose down to his neck, stopping just short of the artery.

 

Vane’s grip fastened on the hilt of his cutlass as he waited with hungry anticipation for retribution.

 

What he got, instead, was a laugh, “Fucking hell, I can’t believe you fucking did it!” The man strode towards him, but to Vane’s shock, he was drawing his cutlass back into its hilt, “Not bad for a scrawny little short arse, are ya?” He shook his head as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing, “You still need some discipline, some training, but fuck me if you don’t have the spirit.”

 

The man reached out a bloody hand to Vane.

 

“Henry Singleton, of the _Diamond_.”

 

Vane took his hand.

 

“Charles Vane, of the _Diamond_.”

 

***

 

A sleepy silence seemed to be falling on Nassau after the noontime festivities. It was early afternoon, that time of day the Spaniards called the siesta, and most of Nassau’s denizens were only too content to comply with the Spanish custom.

 

In Noonan’s office rooms, only Richard Guthrie remained. Mr. Scott had joined him with a small gaggle of children from Noonan’s brothel, those apprentices still too young to be legitimately useful and who served as makeshift servants until they could make a more legitimate income. Among those children was the young Max, who smiled prettily when she saw Mr. Scott, who bowed his head in return. She scampered about with the other children, picking up cutlery and silverware.

 

“And so, Mr. Guthrie?”

 

Richard Guthrie did not seem to hear Mr. Scott. Since Mr. Scott had arrived, there was something strange about Richard Guthrie, a sort of far away quality as though he were present in body only.

 

“What? Oh, yes. Oh, I’d say it was quite a success, quite a success.” Guthrie said, without ever looking at Mr. Scott.

 

“And the men? They seemed amiable with each other?”

 

“Tell me, Mr. Scott. You’ve been in charge of Eleanor’s education for these past years, how ready would you say she is for marriage?”

 

Mr. Scott turned then with a start. The silence of the room was suddenly destroyed as clear and porcelain shatter tore through the silence. Guthrie and Mr. Scott both turned to find Max, ashen faced and wide eyed, standing over a broken plate. Colour rushed back to her face in a red flush and she apologised profusely, falling to her knees and picking up the scattered shards. Before anyone could say anything, she had excused herself and all but ran out of the room.

 

“What a peculiar child,” Guthrie stared after her in open confusion.

 

Though he felt his heart go out to the girl, Mr. Scott said nothing.

 

Guthrie shook his head, “Now where were we? Ah, yes. On the matter of marriage. How would you say her education has prepared her for such a thing?”

 

“I—I cannot really say, sir.” Mr. Scott frowned, both is obvious discomfort and for the fact that he could not begin to imagine what an education for marriage would entail. In all his lectures of numbers and arithmetic, calculus and account-taking, he hardly had given thought to training a girl who could not see a tree without climbing it to marriage.

 

As though reading his thoughts, Guthrie waved his hand in the air, “Yes, yes, I suppose that would be even out of the realm of your expertise. Suppose I should write to mother, maybe she would have some recommendations…” And here Guthrie’s thoughts seemed to wander again.

 

Mr. Scott finally found his courage, and all he could say was, “But sir… She is so young.”

 

“Nonsense!” Guthrie smiled, “My own mother wasn’t much older than she when she married my father.”

 

 _“And look how well you turned out_.” The response that came to Mr. Scott’s mind was entirely unbidden, and he was eternally grateful he had been able to stifle the need to give it audible life.

 

Instead, he said, “Sir, have you…” and here he weighed his words carefully, “Given any regard as to what Eleanor might think of this?”

 

It was clear by Guthrie’s surprised expression that, indeed, he hadn’t.

 

“Whyever would I need to do such a thing?”

 

Mr. Scott sighed. _Whyever, indeed._ Thought Mr. Scott.

 

“Sir, is this… Really necessary? Eleanor, she is… She is—“

 

“My daughter,” Guthrie finished with a stern edge. Still, his features softened, “Oh, come now, Mr. Scott. It is truly moving that you have taken my daughters wants and wishes to heart, it truly is, and I am grateful to you, for all that you’ve done.” And here he smiled, putting his hand on Mr. Scott’s shoulder and giving it a reassuring squeeze, “But you were not here, Mr. Scott. You did not see the way these men stared at each other. Tell me, how long do you think this alliance between the English and the Spanish will last? Come now, I have had you educated, after all.”

 

Mr. Scott looked up to him, “One need not always repeat the mistakes of the past.”

 

Guthrie smiled with pride as one does when a well trained horse successfully clears a hurdle, “And yet one always does. I could barely keep Pargo and Hornigold from throttling each other. Tell me, Mr. Scott, what happens to this treaty when this war with France ends? When that simpleton King of Spain finally passes?”

 

Guthrie’s hand fell from Mr. Scott’s shoulder, and he began to pace around the room, “Do you know the story of Henry VI, Mr. Scott? He was a very pious man, but a simpleton. War brewed his entire life, and only followed him until his death. What do you think will happen when Spain’s halfwit empire finally meets a merciful end?”

 

Guthrie shook his head again and resumed the very spot Mr. Scott had first found him in that day, staring plaintively out the window at the small outpost city that was beginning to grow beneath his feet.

 

“Best to take advantage of this truce now while we still have a chance. If we can secure a Spanish match for Eleanor, we might be able to hold on to trade when the storm finally hits.”

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 5: A Hand in the Darkness

CHAPTER FIVE

A HAND IN THE DARKNESS

_MARCH 3rd, 1697_

 

 

Of the buccaneer fleet of seven tall ships set to return from Martinique, the _Diamond_ sailed alone at anchor nine miles out of the emerald coast of Hispaniola. The water stretched before her in tepid swells that glowed the venomous green of a snake, and only the barest whispered breeze served to keep the men from utter desolation. For seven days and seven nights, the Diamond had sat there under the scorching sun. Waiting. Still no word from the _Achilles_ , no signal from the _Eternal_.

 

He stood at the quarterdeck, his attention solely fixed through a spyglass of copper and wood. He was young, of good height, dressed in a tattered beige shirt of homespun and the tight fitting breeches of the old boucan hunters that had lent his kind their name. His hair he wore unfashionably loose, and it hung just to his shoulders, so that he had needed to pull his hair tightly away from his face in order to keep it from his eyes.

 

Charles Vane was seventeen years old, an unprecedented age for quartermaster, and a title he had fought to keep. The men who had doubted him at first had quickly come to learn that this title he had not won through favour.

 

He lowered the spyglass from his face. His unusually bright eyes were tense and he raised the spyglass to his eye again.

 

“Do you see it?” A lean and boyish man, not much older than Vane himself, hovered behind his Quartermaster. His light brows were drawn, his beakish features tense, and he had the look of a man who had seen the end of the earth stretched before him, and who stood precariously close to losing the contents of his stomach over what he saw there.

 

Vane lowered the spyglass, but he did not look at the boy. “I see it,” he said, his voice grown with age into the beginnings of a low growl, “Get the captain.” Here Vane did turn, his eyes flashing dangerously, “Tell no one what you’ve seen, do you understand me?”

 

The boy gulped and bobbed his head in obeisance, dashing off behind him.

 

When Jennings returned with the young lookout, he took the spyglass from Vane.

 

“Well?” The quartermaster asked, “Do you see it?”

 

There was a tense silence before Jennings tore the spyglass from his eye, “Has it made any move?”

 

“None since I have watched it.” Vane watched his captain’s face for any clues as to what transpired in the old sea dog’s sharp mind, “Could it be a trap?”

 

Jennings’ features were taught, and only those who knew the man well could sense the tension plucking at the corners of his eyes, “I’d rather not stay long enough to find out. Tell the men to—“

 

Thunder crashed from the cloudless sky. With a roar, cannons proclaimed themselves from beyond the starboard side. The ship heaved to the side as a shot grazed her bow, sending men sliding down the deck in an explosion of splintered wood and salt water. A second shot went whistling through the _Diamond’s_ shrouds, just barely missing her canvas.

 

Horrified and surprised men scrambled to the edges of the ship to gaze upon their attacker.

 

A cloud of sails hovered in the distance. Sixteen cannons bristled from the hard sides of a fourth rate Frigate. A silence washed over the ship at the sight of the flags of the English dominion, and of its Royal Navy.

 

To his horror, when Vane looked at his captain, he saw not the look of bloodlust of a captain whose ship had just been shot at, but instead he found a man frozen by the sight in front of him. This same man whom Vane had watched unleash the forces of hell just months ago on French forces, the same man who had ordered the destruction of Fort Royal now stood as pale as a deadman before the sight of the English colours.

 

Another shot careened overhead, barely missing the ship and exploding into the water. The ship heaved and bucked under the power of the heaving water.

 

Water sprayed onto the deck as the ship cut through the end of the swell. Vane had to roar over the sea, _“Captain!”_

Jennings turned to Vane unseeingly. Vane would never forget how Jennings had somehow managed to steady his voice into unquestioning control even while his own face betrayed his tumultuous emotions. “Gather the men, prepare to make chase.”

 

When it became clear that the much larger _Diamond_ intended to give chase, the small naval ship veered, showing the _Diamond_ her rudder, and opened fire with her stern chasers. The wind favoured the _Diamond_ and soon it was in a position to let fly a broadside.

 

With the larger ship looming over it, the battle was relatively quick. In a matter of minutes, the small English ship was bound to the claws of the _Diamond’s_ grapnels, its men pouring into her deck.

 

The ship’s commander, red faced and arrogant to the last, stepped forward to counter the swarm of privateers, finding among them their captain with ease. “What is the meaning of this?” The man heaved, his accent thick with the Northern brogue of a Yorkshire man, “Under what right do you board this ship? This is an outrage for which you will be made to answer!”

 

Upon Jennings’ brow there was no sign of anger, of revulsion, rather a mere acquiescence, “Your ship did fire upon mine first, and I am in need of the provisions which your attack deprived from my men.”

 

The old man blustered, but a strange nervousness seemed to set about him. His hands fidgeted at his side, his bulging eyes darting away from Jennings’ looming presence. “You fly no flag! How was I supposed to know whether you be friend or foe?”

 

It was Vane who responded, “Does the English navy make it a habit of firing upon a ship whose only crime is to not be recognised?”

 

Jennings’ face swung around to Vane, his eyes ablaze with a vicious anger as though to silence him. Vane met his Captains’ gaze head on, for he knew not what his crime was that his Captain should look at him thus.

 

Jennings’ long fingers grabbed Vane by the upper arm as a parent might do to an errant child, drawing him away and giving his back to their captives. Jennings’ eyes glowed with a grey fire on his tense features, and his voice was strained into a hiss, “Vane—“

 

Vane’s hand clenched at his side, the only thing he could do to keep from yanking his superior officer’s hand away from his being, “Was this not the rendezvous spot? We arrive to find no other ships, only an English naval vassal with guns at the ready? Something is not right.”

 

Jennings searched his subordinates eyes for any hint of doubt, any hint of a young boy looking to justify the overstep of his boundaries. But Jennings knew Vane better than that, and at that moment, he resented the boy for it.

 

He let go of his quartermaster’s arm. With a deep and steadying breath, he turned to look at his captive captain. What the captain saw on Jennings’ face, no one could say, but it was enough to make the blood drain from the man’s fleshy and whiskered face.

 

Jennings’ voice was crisp, “Has this ship made any arrests recently?”

 

The other captain bit his lip. “No.”

 

Jennings’ eyes were fixed on the smaller man, unmoving, unwavering, as a snake eyeing a mouse that has no idea it has been caught, “Has this ship come across any other ships by the name of the _Achilles_ or the _Eternal_?”

 

The man’s eyes widened, too much, Vane thought. He looked at Jennings as a man far too desperate to prove the veracity of his words, “No.”

 

When Vane looked to Jennings it was all too clear by his captain’s expression that Jennings no more believed the man than he did.

 

“Search the ship for any signs of the missing men.”

 

The captain’s face reddened to an almost purplish hue, “I guarantee you you will find no prisoners here!”

 

Vane did not try to appear convinced, “We will see about that.”

 

“Come,” Jennings said to the Captain, though he stared at Vane, “I do believe a terrible mistake has been committed. Maybe we can discuss this further in your cabin?” Though he made it a question, all could hear the clear command.

 

The way he’d turned his back to Vane made it all too clear that the quartermaster’s presence would not be needed.

 

“What do you suppose,” came a familiar voice, “Crawled up the captain’s arse and died?”

 

Vane cracked a smile. At seventeen, nature had finally done her job and helped Vane along to the height of the other men. With Jack, however, nature had not been content to stop there. Always lanky, the boy now towered even over their Captain himself, and yet he never seemed to escape a certain air of boyishness that urged all those who looked upon him to regard him as merely an overgrown child.

 

His sense of humour did not help.

 

It was not Vane’s voice who responded, “The man’s hiding something.”

 

Jack turned. Henry Singleton was not as tall as Jack, but this he more than made up for in a formidable show of muscle and sinew that made him look every bit the part of the pirate role their Captain was so keen on avoiding. A scar that ran down his face, a memento from his first meeting with Vane, only added to the man’s terrifying presence.

 

Vane nodded his agreement with a silent nod, watching the captured sailors as though he could see something there that no one else could.

 

Jack frowned, following Vane’s gaze as though he could see what it was that had made his friend go tense, but finding nothing there, “Who is hiding something? Jennings?”

 

Vane shook his head, “The new captain.” Vane was looking from each and every man that was being tied and held on the quarterdeck, to the guns at her sides and their fresh scars on the deck, to the pristine and untouched wood that made up her bow and sides. “I saw him, Jack. He was just sitting out here. In this particular spot. Tell me, what do you see around us?”

 

Jack looked around. They were too far off Hispaniola now to spot the green jungle in the distance, too far from the reefs to see their familiar shadow on the water. There was, indeed, “Nothing.”

 

Vane looked to Jack then, “Exactly.”

 

Realisation dawned on Jack, “You think he was waiting?”

 

Vane nodded.

 

“For who?”

 

Vane’s expression darkened.

 

Jack frowned, following the path of Vane’s gaze, “You can’t mean for us.”

 

Vane’s silence was all the response Jack had needed.

 

Singleton too was staring at the captive men, “But why?”

 

“That’s what I intend to find out.”

 

On the quarterdeck they were soon joined by a dutchman by the name of Johannes, an oarsman the _Diamond_ had acquired in her recent excursion, “Quartermaster, we’ve searched the ship. There is no sign of the missing men.”

 

Jack and Vane look at each other.

 

Vane turned to the captive men, “Where can I find the quartermaster of this ship?”

 

***

 

The Captain, being a middle aged man by the name of Armsmouth, was of that unique position where time and circumstance alone had contrived to raise him to his station in the King’s navy. In his time, Jennings had found most men of such stature to be of that flamboyant and insufferable breed who could not help but to try and make up for their lack of abilities with over the top displays. Armsmouth was little exception. Fine Persian rugs were stretched on the ground of his cabin. Delicately embroidered linens of an Italian hand draped over every conceivable surface. Golden swirls and affects in the French manner adorned the edges of the bookcases, legs of the chairs, and edges of the table. While the deck outside reeked with the smell of blood, sweat and urine, the captain’s quarter’s had been polished until the dark oak there shone with the sun.

 

Both Captains now found themselves sitting on opposite sides of captain’s table. Even sitting down, Jennings had towered over Armsmouth so that the smaller man still had to look up to meet his eyes, “And so you see, Captain…”

 

“Adams,” Jennings smiled cordially, “Captain Adams.”

 

Armsmouth nodded, “Captain Adams, such was my mission. It was only due to a storm that we found ourselves drifting here. When we saw your ship, we merely assumed—“

 

Jennings waved his hand, though there was still a tightness to his smile, a pull at his eyes as though every word he spoke was in mockery of the smaller man, “Have no worries, captain. I only apologise at having interrupted such a fine vessel of his majesty’s navy in such a way. Once you fired upon my ship, why, I only figured of you what you had figured of me.”

 

Armsmouth frowned, “Surely you did see the flag of the navy?”

 

“Unfortunately, the waters have become so treacherous that even his majesty’s colours are as suspicious as having no colours at all.”

 

The revelation came as nothing short of religious blasphemy to Armsmouth, “Surely you can’t mean to tell me that—that pirates have flown the naval flag?”

 

Jennings shook his head with a carefully calculated air of outraged tragedy, “These are vicious times, and those are vicious men. They have no honour among them, no sense of what is proper. Their deception knows no bounds.”

 

Armsmouth was about to reply when the door to his cabin swung open. Both men turned in shock at their intruder.

 

Charles Vane stood at the door. Of countenance he was calm, even relaxed, and he gazed upon the men with some degree of satisfaction. This was strange, if only because his shirt, just moments ago an relatively untouched beige, was now splattered with a dark and terrible red.

 

Jennings closed his eyes, for he felt sure that if he were to look upon his quartermaster now, he might actually strangle him. Over and over again he prayed to whatever God might hear him, be he Catholic or Protestant, that the boy had just gotten in a scuffle and the blood all over him was his own. Jennings’ fears were not alone, for he could feel the man before him go tense, almost hear the blood drain from Armsmouth’s face.

 

“Vane,” Jennings pushed out though his teeth, making a concerted effort to ignore the blood all over his quartermaster, “How good of you to join us. You may tell the men we can put this matter at rest.”

 

A dark eyebrow rose in Vane’s face, and the smile on his face made it clear he did not believe his captain for a minute, “Is that so?”

 

Jennings smiled and, not for the first time, he wondered if slapping that smirk off the boy’s face would somehow drive some common sense into the boy’s thick skull, “Quite so. My good friend Captain Armsmouth here was just relating to me the unfortunate series of misunderstandings that lead to our skirmish. He had just been sent out on a mission to—Port Royal, was it?”

 

The man’s head bobbed, “Yes, yes, I do believe it was Port Royal,”

 

“—yes, to Port Royal, to see about the transfer and release of some French prisoners. When he saw our ship flying no colours, he merely assumed we were an attacking pirate vessel and acted accordingly. Can we really blame him when we acted in kind, Vane?” Jennings smiled.

 

Vane smiled in turn, and Jennings felt his spine grow cold.

 

“The release of French prisoners?” Vane asked, though it was clear he had barely made it a question.

 

Captain Armsmouth looked to his desk with a sudden interest, “Yes, that’s right.”

 

Vane nodded. Too easy, Jennings thought. That had been far too easy.

 

And, indeed, Vane did not leave when he’d heard the Captain’s confirmation.

 

Quite the opposite. Vane strode into the room with all the arrogance of a man who fully belonged there. He approached the Captain’s table, and here the Captain did indeed protest vehemently, his protests growing all the more shrill as Vane carefully counted the second drawer from the top. Be it for the boy’s uncanny presence and the dangerous light in his eyes, or for the blood that was plastered on his shirt, but for all his protests, Armsmouth never once made any sort of physical move to stop the boy. Quite the opposite, it seemed as though he were doing all he could to keep himself from running to the other side of the room in order to put as much distance between him and Vane as possible.

 

Jennings did not stop to question Vane, for indeed he was given no time. Vane drew from the desk a stack of papers, written in the scrolling hand so unique to legal documents, and emblazoned with an English seal. So too did he draw the ship’s ledger.

 

Armsmouth blustered another feeble protest, but Vane merely spoke over him.

 

“Shall I read, Captain Armsmouth, or would you do me the honours?”

 

“You don’t—You don’t understand—How did you—Who--? The man’s watery eyes widened impossibly wide and his voice fell to just above a whisper, “…To whom does that blood belong?”

 

Vane merely ignored him and drew one of the papers to him, “By order of his Majesty King William the third, King of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, it is hereby announced that all men loyal to the crown are obliged to find the one they call Henry Every, known to go by Henry Avery, Old Ben,” Vane looked up at Captain Armsmouth then, “or The Pirate King, and to bring him to the King’s lawful justice or be otherwise compelled to do him harm. Any man who is charged with or suspected with having served and or aided the pirate are also to be brought in, be they living or dead, to face lawful punishment for their heinous crimes against the King’s allies. Be it known that any crimes done against those who are allied with the king is as unforgivable as a crime done unto the King himself, and is therefore a crime against England and all Englishmen. To show his gratitude, the King his majesty has placed a bounty of five hundred thousand pieces of eight to be bestowed to the man who brings to him the fiend who would disrupt the peace of his realm, and five hundred pieces of eight for the capture of Avery’s men and allies.”

 

Captain Armsmouth swallowed compulsively, “A—A pamphlet, really. They were handed out at every ship setting port. I—I—Every Englishman knows of Henry Avery.”

 

Jennings looked back to Vane, but it was clear he had been prepared for this. Vane opened the ledger with the full confidence of one who knew exactly what to look for. Within moments he had opened up the ledger to a particular page and slid the ledger over to his Captain.

 

Jennings frowned as he took in the rows upon rows of accounts. It was Vane who said, “It is exactly as I was told. Halfway down that page. Ten thousand pieces of eight to the Captain of the _Eternal_. Five thousand pieces of eight to the Captain of the _Achilles_.”

 

“That, you see—“

 

Vane cut him off, “I was not aware of either ship carrying any French prisoners in their brigs, and I assure you I spent quite some time in both the _Achilles_ and the _Eternal_.”

 

Armsmouth opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it. He looked to Jennings who seemed engrossed in the book, though his eyes had the glossy look of a man deep in thought.

 

“Captain Armsmouth, tell me this, and I will know if you are lying.” Jennings looked up, his eyes fixed on the trembling sailor, “Did any of the men of the _Achilles_ of the _Eternal_ give you any reason to suspect I, or any of my men, of being in league with the one they call Henry Every?”

 

“Absolutely not!” Captain Armsmouth said, so quickly he nearly tripped over his words. Again his eyes had grown wide, again he had that same look of a man desperate to be believed.

 

Vane smirked, sure he was that he had finally caught the slimy English vassal, “Then why the ransom?”

 

Armsmouth’s throat tightened. Sweat beaded on his reddened forehead. He looked to the side, to the floor. His hands danced on his desk. His papers, his quill, his whiskers. His papers, his quill, his whiskers. His paper, his quill, his whiskers. When his hand reached for his papers, a knife slammed right next to the knuckle of his pointer finger, just barely missing bone and driving the blade into the oak desk.

 

Armsmouth looked up to find Vane staring down at him. He’d never even seen the boy move.

 

“It was—It was—It was retribution!” A light sparked behind Armsmouth’s cloudy eyes, “Yes, it was retribution. The _Achilles_ and the _Eternal_ both were found to be guilty of attacking a French port. Since peace with France has been signed, they chose to pay a fee for restoration rather than face trial back in England.” Armsmouth sighed, for he had spoken so much and so fast he had never remembered to draw a breath.

 

Vane laughed, “Surely you cannot expect us to—“

 

“Well!” Finally it was Jennings’ voice who cut in, “I should say that clears matters up!”

 

Vane turned to Jennings. There was a clear warning in Jennings’ eyes.

 

“I do believe all this has proved that a grave misunderstanding has been committed! On both our sides.” Jennings stood then and reached his hand to Captain Armsmouth who eyed it as though it were likely to sprout teeth and bite him at any time. Jennings smiled cordially, “Captain Armsmouth, I am most terribly sorry to have caused you such harm. Though, I do hope you’ll agree we were both at fault in this most unfortunate day?”

 

Armsmouth still eyed Jennings’ outreached hand with hesitation, but slowly he reached out and shook it, “I-Indeed.”

 

When Jennings didn’t pull Armsmouth closer and drive a cutlass through his heart, Armsmouth stood up.

 

“Best of luck in your enterprises, then. Should you come across that Avery character, I do wish you the best.” Jennings looked to Vane as though nothing out of the ordinary had just occurred, “Vane, call the men. We shall return to the ship at once.”

 

Vane frowned, “But Captain—“

 

“Quartermaster,” Jennings said, and though he still smiled, the word alone was packed with venom, “If you could call the men? The wind is picking up and I would rather we not waste any more of our time.”

 

Frowning, Vane followed after his captain until a voice called out to him as he reached the door.

 

“Where is my Quartermaster?” Came the voice of Armsmouth, having about it a sudden gravity that Vane had not heard for so long as his osn Captain had loomed before the captive sailor.

 

Vane shrugged, looking at Armsmouth over his shoulder, “He must have tripped in the battle. You should probably have a doctor look at him. Ships can be dangerous places, Captain.”

 

“Why is there blood on your shirt?” Armsmouth’s voice trembled with fury.

 

Vane shrugged again, “You fired at us, did you not? I tripped.”

 

And with that, Vane left the man to fume.

 

Outside the deck, Vane quickly caught up to Jennings, “What in the hell was—“

 

“Gather the men,” There was a strange urgency in Jennings’ voice that made Vane pause, “Gather the men as quickly as you can and get us as far from here as we can go.”

 

Vane felt something inside him give way. He stopped in front of his Captain, blocking his way, “You intend on letting these men go? Surely you don’t believe a word that filthy rat had to say! We were betrayed, these men will—“

 

Within the breath of a second, Jennings had closed the distance between them, he was so close he had to look down to meet Vane’s eyes. “Do not question me, not now, quartermaster. Do you really think me such a fool that I believe that man? But we have no choice.”

 

Vane did not back away, “What do you mean we have no choice? You intend on having us run from them? For how long? After what just happened, they will come back for retribution, as well as that ransom. If we kill them now we can sleep at night knowing that nothing has changed.”

 

“I am not in the business of butchering Englishmen, Vane!” Jennings roared, with such ferocity that all the men on deck stopped for fear of the man’s boiling wrath. “Much less sailors who are doing nothing but their duty, and who cannot be held accountable for their captain’s greed.”

 

Jennings leaned closer to Vane, “Now gather my men, unless you would like to stay and provoke the captain further, maybe goad him into coming after us with an armada?” Jennings hissed.

 

For all the men that had frozen at Jennings’ rage, it was only Vane who still met him head on, “You will regret this, Captain _._ ”

 

***

 

When the first package had arrived from her father, Eleanor had not known what to do with it. It had merely sat by the window at the end of her white plastered room while Eleanor had pondered on what possible occurrence could have taken place that would possess her father to send her, well, anything.

 

When she finally opened it, and this she did as one might open a package filled with serpents, she saw something infinitely more ponderous than a gaggle of spitting reptiles. At first she thought it a box—a fine box, to be sure, of pristine white ivory carved with graceful depictions of pastoral meadows and frolicking village girls picked out in amber and gold. But it was inside the box itself that she had found a small treasure trove. There were gold hair combs of silk roses and sprays of pearls, of hair ribbons of every colour, each of a soft and lustrous velvet, and a small collection of delicate and fine necklaces befitting a young woman of her age.

 

When the second package came, she had responded to it with no less hesitation than earlier, for she was convinced there must have been some mistake (though this by no means meant that she was about to rectify any imagined mistake by returning any of the gifts she’d received to her father.) And once more in this second package she found no immediate threats to her life, no letter accusing her of theft and of being a bad child. There, wrapped in pink silk, was a stack of new chemises of fine white cotton, hemmed with eyelet lace threaded with blue silk ribbons and finished with a gathered froth of needle lace. A card attached read _Rue de la Provence, Paris_ in a scrolling hand _._

For years, Eleanor had dreamt of when a time might come that her father might remember her existence. And now, suddenly finding herself swamped with presents and gifts, Eleanor did not feel the joy she thought she would, only a strange sense of apprehension. For though Eleanor was fourteen years old, she had spent enough time around men to know when she was being bribed. And that these gifts of tutors and of clothes, of dancing lessons and music lessons came not from her father’s kindness of heart, but rather a conversation Max had overheard a year ago. A conversation that pertained wholly to Eleanor’s future, and a conversation in which she had been decidedly absent.

 

But one year had passed, one year of lessons and studies, one year of tutors and masters, and the looming threat of marriage had still not been as of yet levelled against her. And so it was that Eleanor dedicated herself twice as hard, three times as hard, to her studies, for indeed she believed that if she could prove herself to her father, if she could make herself as useful to him as Mr. Scott, then maybe he might come to reconsider the matter altogether. Maybe if she just worked hard enough, if she could just show him some amount of her potential, her father might even come to embrace her presence if only in the capacity of a worker as opposed to shunning her company altogether as though she were something contagious to be avoided at all costs.

 

Surely then he’d understand. It wasn’t that she’d never wanted to get married, she told herself. It was just that she was young yet, and marriage did so seem like a prospect more suited for those who had lived long lives and experienced much, well lived women with ages like nineteen or even twenty years old. By then she’d be ready. But not now, she told herself. _Not now_.

 

Eleanor was now staring at the fourth of her father’s gifts. Inside the package was a parcel of dusty blue silk tied with sky-blue silk ribbons. When she opened this she found it there, something she had not seen in a long time.

 

She’d been a little girl then. She could not remember how she woke up, but only that when she did, a soft and feminine laughter had filled the house. Light had poured into the white hallways, and a breeze from the ocean had been kicking her mother’s translucent voile curtains into the air so that the entire world seemed to have a soft haze to it. When Eleanor, who must not have been much older than three at the time, found the source of the laughter, she came across a scene that seemed like something straight out of a storybook. Her mother’s face glowed in laughter. She’d stood on a small platform, her arms stretched to the sides, her white chemise billowing around her in the fragrant breeze. All around her, serving girls and friends laughed and giggled, like sprites and nymphs doting and flittering around their queen. Her mother’s eyes met Eleanor and she smiled, as radiant as the morning sun. She beckoned Eleanor over, but did not move.

 

_“Come on. Watch carefully, now. One day, you will be a fine lady and your turn will come.”_

 

The other women laughed until the room seemed to be filled with their song. Eleanor did as her mother bid, as wide eyed and astonished as though she witnessed something otherworldly. One of her mother’s attendants brought over a pair of stays and gently began to lace her mother up, so that her billowing figure was suddenly turned into that of a woman. Upon witnessing this strange transformation, Eleanor had been convinced something just short of magic must have occurred.

 

But there was no song now, no nymphs flitting about her, no more her mother’s kind smile. It was a blustering and windless May morning in Nassau, and Eleanor could only hear the twittering of the quail doves outside her window, and the raunched laughter of men and seagulls in the distance. In these circumstances, the piece of cloth she held in her hands seemed a lot less magical.

 

She turned the thing this way and that, cocking her head as though this would help her make sense of it. The stays were not like the one she vaguely recalled belonging to her mother. Here she could make out the long lengths of whalebone, much thicker, she thought, than the fine and graceful lines on her mother’s eleven years ago. The shoulders were not attached, and came with a set of blue ribbon bows. The more she looked at the damn thing the more concerned she grew, for there were indeed enough ribbons to tie down a giant. Ribbons hung from the hips. Ribbons tied at the back. Ribbons at the shoulders. Ribbons at the breast. Far and away there were enough damn ribbons to hang her three times over.

 

As her exasperation grew, Eleanor could hear the ghostly echo of her mother’s words as they reverberated through her mind, _“One day, you will be a fine lady and your turn will come.”_

 

Here Eleanor took a deep and steadying breath. A fine lady, her mother had said. Marriage was her father’s unspoken words. Though Eleanor had no particular opinion on the institution, it should be said that this was the first time her father had payed her any attention since her mother’s death. Though she resented it deeply, some part of Eleanor still longed for her father’s approval. Though she could feel the temptation to rebel against anything her father wished, it was what her mother would have wanted too. A fine lady, indeed. She should be happy to find herself walking down the path her mother had dreamed for her, and yet Eleanor felt only a strange edge of apprehension. But that, she told herself, was silly. What greater goal could there be than becoming a woman as fine as her mother had been? What greater goal than to do her mother’s memory honour? Surely her mother wouldn’t have wanted her to go on the rest of her life climbing trees and playing among pirate camps. She was a young lady now, after all.

 

She raised the strange garment in the air and considered it. If playing the part of fine lady meant that she and Mr. Scott would never again have to wonder when money for rations would come in, then surely it couldn’t be so bad. And as for marriage… She knew she was supposed to feel some enormous sense of thrill at the very idea, and yet she found she felt only an absolute and profound nothingness. Neither excitement nor dread, rather a bleak and yawning nothingness at the prospect. She shook her head. The strange behaviour she simply chalked up to her age and told herself she’d think about it later.

 

Eleanor sat by the window and fastidiously laced the silk ribbon through the eyelets in the back, cursing voraciously within minutes as the task proved more difficult that it had seemed. Once done, Eleanor slid the thing over her head and shoulders and adjusted it to her waist. She reached to the back and drew the two loops of ribbon that were, she figured, supposed to tie to her body.

 

As she stared at the loops in her hands there came the terrible and annoying realisation of why her mother had needed attendants. She tried giving the things a decisive tug but it did her little good, and the stays seemed resolute in their decision to simply sag about her middle.

 

Eleanor made a face. She could ask Mr. Scott for help, but she was sure to get some silly lecture on her state of dress and plentiful use of the words ‘young lady.’ She could take it to Max, but Max wouldn’t be free of her chores for another two hours.

 

That was when, out of the corner of her eye, Eleanor spotted something. Standing there in nothing but her chemise and loose stays, Eleanor held the two loops of ribbon and stared at a door handle with the budding interest of an idea half-formed.

 

***

 

It was long past sunset, when the lanterns were being lit and the taverns were beginning to swell, when Max finally grew tired of waiting and began to feel the first pangs of worry.

 

Her chores done, she had bounded to the old manor as fast as her feet could take her. Since coming to this god forsaken Island, Eleanor’s presence had been the one thing she could count on at the end of the day. By the time Max finished her work, Eleanor could always be counted on to be there in the dining room waiting for her, as reliable as the song of the cicadas that heralded the coming of the night. So when today she found no one waiting for her, Max could not help but feel that something must have gone terribly wrong.

 

When Mr. Scott had opened the door, he had not looked as though he’d shared Max’s worries. He simply smiled at her in the kind way he always did and beckoned her in, telling her Eleanor was upstairs. This still did not assuage her fears, and indeed it only made them worse, for how could Mr. Scott understand that Eleanor had always waited for Max, and clearly something must have gone terribly wrong if she had locked herself in her room?

 

Max took the stairs three steps up at a time, her eyes quickly accustoming to the darkness of the half abandoned Guthrie manor. She practically crashed through the door to Eleanor’s room and was greeted with a sleepy, “ _Ow._ ”

 

Max stopped, blinking away the darkness. “Eleanor?”

 

“I’m right here.”

 

Max frowned, looking around the small room bathed in the purplish bath of the twilight hour but finding no sight of her friend, “Where?”

 

Eleanor’s response came from the darkness in the small voice of someone who would rather not be heard, “On the floor…”

 

Max looked down. The utter ludicrousness of the scene that greeted her made all her previous fears and worries evaporate into thin air, and she laughed that rich melodious laugh.

 

Eleanor lay in a heap of cotton, ribbons and golden hair on the floor. As Max took in the sight and laughed, slowly she began to make sense of what had happened. A pair of loose stays were tangled around Eleanor’s waist. The ribbons that were, theoretically, supposed to tie at the back, were tangled and stretched taut between a scattering of knobs on her armoire before reaching across the room to the doorknob, so that the cumulative effect was of a little human girl lost in a tangle of cat’s cradle.

 

Max set about untangling her friend one strand at a time, laughing all the meanwhile, “What did you even try to do?”

 

Eleanor’s face blushed a bright crimson, “It seemed like a good idea at the time!”

 

This only caused Max to laugh harder, and Eleanor found her defensiveness giving way to the sound of her friend’s laugh, and soon she too was laughing so that the whole room seemed to fill with the rich sound of the girl’s shared humour.

 

“Why didn’t you call Mr. Scott?”

 

“And have him see me like this?!”

 

This only caused Max to laugh harder, “What would you have done if I hadn’t come?”

 

Eleanor stared at Max as though she’d just suggested the sun might not rise in the morning, “Why wouldn’t you come?”

 

Max sighed, though no matter how hard she fought it, she couldn’t keep from smiling. It was strange to feel needed, but she found that the feeling was nice, warm. “You are utterly hopeless. Come, stand up.”

 

Max reached her hand to Eleanor and helped her to her feet. In a few well practiced movements she had the laces where they should be. With each tug Eleanor threatened to fall back on her hindquarters, so that Max was eventually resigned to having Eleanor hold on to one of her bedposts.

 

“Never figured you for stays, these are beautiful… I’ve never seen this kind before.” None of the women in Noonan’s brothel had yet acquired a set of the new fashionable whalebone stays, most still using the old fashioned reed-boned variety that were now ten years out of date. Max had only ever seen these things in the rare fashion editorials men brought over at the behest of their favourite women.

 

“The next part of my father’s wedding trousseau, I imagine.” Eleanor said, a hard and brittle edge to her voice.

 

“You think he already has anyone in mind?”

 

There was a silence between the girls, the room being filled only with the sound of the chirping cicadas and the ribbons sliding through the eyelets. When Eleanor opened her mouth to speak she suddenly found that no sound would come out. Though the subject of marriage haunted her, she found she could no more speak of it to Max than she could to Mr. Scott. She swallowed and said instead,

 

“How are your chores going?”

 

If Max noticed the abrupt change of subject, she didn’t say it, and at that moment, Eleanor loved her dearly for it.

 

“I’ve been set to follow Angela about the brothel now. She’s to… Teach me what it is I’ll need to know.” There was a rehearsed calm to Max’s voice, but Eleanor could hear the tension that trembled just beneath the words, “Mrs. Mapleton says that I am so fetching they might just do something special for me, you know.” She laughed, a mirthless and forced sound, “An auction. It’s very rare, you know. They only do that for the most beautiful girls. The ships from last year are set to return from Martinique with a great haul of gold. Who knows, if the price goes high enough, I might just be able to match my buying price!” Eleanor could feel the trembling in Max’s fingers at her back.

 

Eleanor turned then and grabbed her friend by the hands. “Remind me. Did I ever tell you the story of the Corsaire from last year who sailed to the Ottoman Empire?”

 

Max frowned, clearly confused as to where Eleanor had suddenly sprung this from, “No..?”

 

Eleanor beamed in that way Max knew meant she had come across an idea. Eleanor fell back to the bed, dragging Max down with her. She grinned conspiratorially, looking all the more like some imp in the darkness.

 

Max clung to the silence, waiting for her friend to provide the story. But Eleanor only laughed, rolling over in the bed and lighting a lamp on her bedside table. The flame flickered to light and a warm orange glow filled the room, and Eleanor jumped back on the bed, forgetting her stays and wincing at their sharp reminder. Max laughed then, and Eleanor fixed her with a sharp look,

 

“You want the story or not?”

 

“If you can keep yourself alive long enough to tell it,” Max stopped laughing though her eyes still shone bright with laughter.

 

“A long, long time ago,” Eleanor began with a great and grandiose tone, “There lived a beautiful young girl named Roxelana who was captured by pirates from her village, torn from her family’s arms. Locked in the decks of the ship, she was taken all the way from her home to the Ottoman Empire, for you see, she had been sold as a slave into the Sultan’s Harem. The Sultan is their version of a king, you see.”

 

“Eleanor, I know what a Sultan is.”

 

Eleanor placed a hand to her chest in mock offense, “And do you know the story I’m trying to tell?”

 

Max grinned, “No.”

 

“Then let me finish! So, in the Sultan’s Harem, all the most beautiful women in the world had been trapped, like beautiful birds that are caught and put into a golden cage. They’d spend their days preparing themselves to be the most beautiful among their ranks, for at night, the sultan would come.”

 

“He would look among all these his precious and beautiful birds and pick out which among them he liked best, and that night he’d take her to his bed. But Roxelana noticed something that terrified her. For, you see, no matter how beautiful the woman the Sultan took to his bed, and no matter how infatuated the Sultan seemed with her, unless the woman could bare him a son, she was soon forgotten, left to rot in her gilded cage and never to know freedom again.”

 

When Eleanor saw Max’s expression begin to fall, a terror creep into her eyes, she leaned closer. “Now Roxelana was smart, but so was every other woman in the harem. So if she couldn’t capture the sultan’s heart through her beauty alone, maybe, she thought, she could outsmart him. And so she came up with a cunning plan.

 

One night, she caught the Sultan’s eyes. And on that night, he picked her from all women.

 

He took her to his bed, laid her down and gazed upon her beauty. But before her could take her for his, she stopped him. Shocked at such an act by a slave girl, the Sultan demanded to know on what grounds did she have the right to refuse him?

 

And here Roxelana bowed her head meekly, and she said, ‘My great Sultan, though it hurts me to cause you offense, and though your honour and might are highest in the land, I am afraid I am bound to a higher power than even thou your majesty’s.’

 

Eleanor lowered her voice in a young girl’s imitation of an older man to Max’s glee, “‘A higher power!’ the Sultan roared, ‘Who had a higher power than I, Sultan of the Ottomans?’

 

And here she responded, ‘Though you are indeed the greatest among mortal men, I am bound to Allah’,” here Eleanor ducker her head conspiratorially, “For that is the Arab’s word for God, you know. …And don’t say you already knew that!”

 

When Max merely grinned in concession, Eleanor went on, “And here the Sultan was taken aback, for you see, the Sultan was a deeply pious man, and in the teachings of his religion, a man could not lay down with a woman of his own faith lest he marry her. Were she but a Catholic or a Protestant or any some such, he would have been free of his vows, but you see, Roxalana had outsmarted him. Long before he had the opportunity to take her to bed, she had had herself converted, and so it was that if he wished to lie with her, he would have to marry her, and make of her Empress of the great Ottoman Empire.”

 

It was at this point where Eleanor knew she had Max on her every word, for the young girl’s eyes had gone wide, and upon her face there was now only a bright and hungry sort of look.

 

Eleanor grinned, as she had always enjoyed having others in the thrall of her words, “As I said before, Roxelana was a great beauty, but so were many other women in the Sultan’s Harem. He could have easily cast her aside and gone for another woman, no? Ah, but you see, he found himself intrigued with this foreign slave who had outsmarted him, Emperor of the Ottomans. And so he began to see her at night, never, of course, taking her to bed, for it would be a grave sign to do so. But the more time he spent with her, the more he found himself falling in love with this slave who had outsmarted a king. And finally, driven mad by passion and love, he gave in to her demands. In exchange for her body and love, he made of this kidnapped slave girl the Empress of all the Ottomans, and a peasant woman turned slave thus became one of the most powerful women in the world. She was beautiful, yes, but because she was clever, she became more powerful than anyone else save for the Emperor himself.”

                                                                                                                                     

Max looked at Eleanor, but Eleanor found that rather than looking relieved or excited, the story had only had something of a ponderous effect on Max.

 

When Max finally spoke it was in a small voice, “But… Do you think he loved her?”

 

And here Eleanor frowned, as though she didn’t quite understand the question. “I mean, she was now an empress on her own right. She could do whatever she wanted, go wherever she pleased. Does it really matter if he loved her?”

 

A silence hung between them, Eleanor’s attention innocently wandering to a flitting moth overhead as it flew into a spider’s web. She watched as it struggled to break free, but in its struggles it only managed to make itself more and more entangled. At the corner of the spider web she saw the hungry spider who merely sat there and waited for her meal.

 

Eleanor would never know how her words had rang in Max’s head. Max stared down at her hands, tight on her lap. “Maybe I will have a Sultan of my own. A rich man, English or French, maybe, and he will love me, and he will come to this Island and take me far away.”

 

Eleanor’s head swung around at that. Max stared in some shock as Eleanor’s eyes had gone wide, her already pale face going paler in the flickering lamp light.

 

“But that would be so sad,” Eleanor said in a voice uncharacteristically small for her.

 

Max blinked, for surely she must have misheard, “Sad? To get away from here?”

 

Eleanor looked at Max, her eyes earnest and hurt, “But then you’d be gone, and I’d be left here all alone.”

Max smiled gently, “But you’d have Mr. Scott!”

 

Eleanor reached over the bed and took Max’s hands in her own, “But I don’t want Mr. Scott alone, I want Max!”

 

Max felt a peculiar stammer in her chest, and the strangest warmth that crept up her neck and to her cheeks.

 

Eleanor gave Max’s hands a squeeze, “I want Max and Mr. Scott, why can’t I have both?”

 

And here Max laughed again, “Has anyone ever told you you are remarkably greedy?”

 

Eleanor smiled then, and Max felt the peculiar flutter in her chest again, “Constantly. I’m starting to take it as a compliment.”

 

With her heart hammering in her chest, Max worked up a courage she didn’t know she’d need and said, “Well what if—“ She hesitated, swallowing hard and looking down at the mattress. She took a deep breath and spoke fast, “What if--- What if we left together?”

 

Max slowly looked up, with a great hesitation for fear of what she would find when she saw Eleanor’s face. Derision? Mockery? Rejection? Max took another deep breath.

 

When she looked up, she saw neither rejection nor disgust on Eleanor’s face, merely a quietly contemplative look that made Max’s heart skip a beat.

 

Eleanor smiled then, and she looked at Max as though she were the most important person in the world, the only person in the world, and when Eleanor reached for Max’s hands it were as though her touch was a connection to a lifeline, and that if she let go at that moment, Max would be lost, swallowed up by a wave and overwhelmed into nothingness.

 

“You’re the only reason I can even stand this place. No matter where we go, so long as I have Max, I’ll be happy.”

 

And Max gave Eleanor’s hand a firm squeeze, and for that one moment, all her hardships and troubles, all the evils that awaited her back to Noonan’s brothel disappeared as they always did with Eleanor. The girls laughed among themselves, planning for their future escapades. The dreamt of all the places they’d go, all the things they’d see, all the thing’s they’d do when they got there. For Eleanor, it was all a part of the dreams and games that had sustained her for her brief and exhausting life in exile from her family, but to Max it was a lifeline, the thought that her hardships could be endured for she knew that at the end of the line there was a grand adventure just waiting for her, for her and Eleanor.

 

When Mr. Scott opened the door, the girls were red with laughter and joy, and Mr. Scott had a hard time and he usually did separating themselves.

 

“Max, Mrs. Mapleton is looking for you. Eleanor, lessons.”

 

He had never enjoyed parting them, but even Mr. Scott could sense that there was something different today. Not for Eleanor, but for the young Max. The way she stared at Eleanor, the way she lingered upon the door. Mr. Scott watched Max disappear into the night with a terrible kind of sadness he could not put a name to.

 

***

 

Though studious, Eleanor felt entirely justified in skipping her lessons if only due to her inherent dislike of this particular tutor. Her past tutor had been a retired law student from Cambridge, a young and handsome man who had derided the fascination with Latin as old fashioned and encouraged her to follow in the ancient Greek that had been considered modern and chic among academic circles in England. He had never talked down to her, and sparked in her a great love of law as well as her existing love of calculus and numbers.

 

Unfortunately, a handsome and well educated man does not last long in New Providence. He had become enamored of one of Noonan’s girls, and disappeared one night in what had been called matrimonial bliss.

 

And so he had been replaced with a specimen more fitting to Nassau’s environment, an old, crusty puritan of a man who had decried her mother’s books on the philosophies of Moore as silly dribble from a papist, and thus quickly won Eleanor’s scorn.

 

It only gave Eleanor a great sense of glee to know that he sat alone somewhere in Nassau, in the rancid old office in Noonan’s tavern, listening to the moans of cries of the women and waiting for a little charge that would not come.

 

Eleanor sat at the beach, watching the starry, moonless. It had been too long since the last ships had made dock, and she knew that some of the ships from the Martinique expedition were soon to land.

 

And so, indeed, a shadow did appear on the horizon, blue against the inky sky. But as it grew nearer and nearer, Eleanor felt a distinct sense of apprehension at the back of her mind.

 

What approached Nassau was not one of the schooners or frigates of the privateers and merchants of Nassau.

 

The thing that came upon Nassau was a massive creature, of four masts that shot into the sky and billowed what looked to be miles of canvas. Painted a dark black, the warship seemed to be a shadow moving across the water, as silent as it was gigantic. Eleanor felt her breath catch. Twenty five guns struck out from each side to a collective fifty, and from the beach Eleanor could make out as much men on the deck as there were on the beach.

 

Flying atop the mast was the sails of the English dominion, and the flag of its royal navy.

 

***

 

Vane knew that Nassau had come into view when the _Diamond_ began to bristle with a particular kind of energy. It were as though the wind had been listening to the wishes of the men, and by the time the sun had begun to climb on the horizon, the green shores of Nassau began to rise in promise ahead of them. Men huddled at the edge of the ship where plans were exchanged, private jokes shared. No matter what job was assigned, no one complained, no one objected. The faster they were done, the faster they were released to port.

 

Vane had no trouble ceding his shoreleave to his men. And if his men took that as an act of magnanimity on his part, he wouldn’t object, though the truth was he was in no particular hurry to favour Nassau’s shores over any other. Although since the conflict over the Naval ship, communications between him and Jennings had been such that he vaguely wondered whether a trip to shore wouldn’t do him good, if only to stay away from his captain. Though Jennings had been curt but courteous, it was Vane’s own emotions and temper that made him crave somekind of distance.

 

Jack had found him on the quarterdeck of the ship, cross legged as an indian and with his spyglass to Nassau’s shores.

 

Jack smirked to himself when he saw the opportunity his friend’s distraction offered him. He eased his steps, steadied his breathing. One step, breathe in. Another step, breathe out. Closer, step by step, breath by--

 

“A deaf man in the brig could hear you, Jack.”

 

Jack let out a breath in a sigh. He flopped next to his friend for, indeed, such is the only word that can describe Jack’s innate grace. He craned his neck behind Vane, squinting at the shore.

 

“What are you looking for?”

 

Vane drew the spyglass away from his face and looked to Jack with a surprised expression, “What makes you think I’m looking for anything?”

 

Jack shrugged, “You’ve been looking through that thing at the shore since we got in.”

 

Vane opened his mouth to speak but found no words came out. He blinked, stared down at his spyglass, “I… Don’t rightly know.”

 

Jack laughed at that, stretching his long legs before him, “You’ve been on this ship far too long, old friend.”

 

Vane looked through his spy glass again, “I gave the men my leave.”

 

“I heard! Quite the giver you are! But between the captain not being angry with you and you not being angry with the captain, I think either one of you gets off this damn ship or we will all find ourselves under a very not angry war.”

 

“You just want an excuse to go to the brothels without having to explain yourself to Bonny.” Vane didn’t even try to make it a question.

 

Jack grinned, “Can you blame me? I could be sitting there with my cock in one hand and a barrel of gold in the other and I guarantee you they would still swarm to Anne first. It’s those eyes, you know.” He smiled and Vane was glad he was looking through the spyglass for he knew exactly the dumb face Jack always made when talking or thinking about Bonny, “Besides, you don’t have an option.”

 

Vane smirked, “You’ll kill me if I don’t go?”

 

“Worse, I will sit here, right next to you, and I will not stop talking until eight bells tomorrow.”

 

Jack waited for Vane’s response, ideally something in his usual growl, but heard none.

 

“Vane?”

 

To this Jack got no response.

 

“Vane!”

 

Vane pulled his spyglass away, frowning.

 

“Good God, man. Don’t tell me you spotted another navy ship? I tell you, the war is over a few months and suddenly—“

 

Before Jack could finish he found the spyglass shoved into his hands, “Look to the shore.”

 

Jack did as he was told. “Alright.”

 

“Look to the city streets,”

 

“Yes.”

 

“What do you see?”

 

Jack shrugged behind the spyglass, “Nothing. Look, I feel as though we’ve done—“

 

“ _Who_ do you see?”

 

Slowly, Jack lowered the spyglass. His lips tightened, and then he looked through the spyglass again.

 

“There’s no one.”

 

He turned to Vane, handing him back the spy glass. A silence beat between the men.

 

“Surely—They’ve just reached shore. Certainly they’re all in the brothels.”

 

Vane raised his brows, “All the men? Even from the existing camps?”

 

Jack shook his head, “Men don’t just disappear into thin air, Charles.”

 

“No,” Vane said, “They don’t.”

 

***

 

It was soon after six bells had rang and the sun was just past its zenith in the sky when Jack and Vane found themselves on shore.

 

Few things had, indeed, changed. The streets of raw red clay dotted with puddles of rancid water and the smell of urine. The Spanish style buildings with their plaster walls thinly patched after the last hurricane that had left the town barely standing. The dark alleyways and ramshackle huts of those who grew tired of searching for a home and decided to set themselves up by Nassau’s thin thoroughfare.

 

Jack fell in stride with Vane, “I see no real difference from when we were here last.”

 

Vane looked around them as though he expected the very shadows to jump out at them, “Exactly. Last time we were here, the Island had been cleared by the war. But there is no war now, Jack.”

 

Jack opened his mouth to protest but his friend did, indeed, have a point. Unconsciously, Jack began moving closer to Vane as they walked.

 

The brothel too had been as empty as when they’d first arrived on Nassau, before the coming of the great Pirate King had swelled her beaches and filled her brothels.

 

With his characteristic penchant for the dramatic, Jack had found the same spot they’d first taken on the bar where one year earlier Jack had taken it upon himself to introduce Vane to the mysteries of women.

 

Jack saw Vane looking around him and grinned to himself, “Looking for a shadow to jump at you, or for anyone in particular?”

 

Vane swung around to look at Jack, and it was the first time Jack had seen his quartermaster try to feign a look of surprise, “Who would I be looking for?”

 

Jack laughed, “So there is somebody! My, she must have made quite a mark on you last year. And here you haven’t told me a thing!”

 

Vane had never been more relieved to see a serving girl, even if for entirely different reasons than those Jack’s imagination were currently occupied with. He gestured towards the two mugs placed before them, “Just drink your fucking rum.”

 

“Oh no, you are not getting…“ Jack continued on, but Vane soon found himself not listening.

 

Vane could see her over the tip of his mug. A waifish thing, with a mass of red curls dyed a bright orange. Her lips were stretched thin so that they became nothing more than a thin line across her face. Her eyes darted nervously between Vane and Jack and the handful of men in the room. When she looked at him her eyes were wide, desperate.

 

Almost as if in a silent plea.

 

Vane held the mug to his face when he spoke, “Jack. Raise your mug to your face. But whatever you do, do not drink from it.”

 

Jack laughed, “What is it now—“

 

Vane’s voice fell into a low growl, deeper, darker than anything Jack had ever heard before, “Just do it.”

 

Vane met the girl’s eyes, his head jerking down in a silent acknowledgement. The girl swallowed and nodded back.

 

Vane didn’t move but watched the girl from the corner of his eye as she scampered around the room, always sticking to the edges, always close to the walls. She gathered her friends and drew them to the sunlit courtyard in the middle of the structure. She stopped before the stairs and looked to Vane, he kept his eyes steady. The girl mouthed a silent _thank you_ and bounded up the stairs to the upstairs balconies, dragging her friends after her.

 

Vane did not know how much time had passed, but a dark memory of his own past gave him some sense of what would happen next.

 

It must have been ten minutes before the first man behind him fell.

 

After that, the men began to fall like a stack of dominoes. Those who lasted longer had just enough time to watch their brothers fall, just enough time to try to escape before the poison proved too strong and they too fell into the dark and dreamless sleep that had haunted Vane since that cursed night so many years ago.

 

Vane closed his eyes. He could feel the pounding of his heart in his chest. He remembered the time he’d spent with Shackleton, regretted not having brought him along. All he had now was what Shackleton had taught him. Jack was good, but was he good enough? Vane let out a slow breath.

 

They seemed to appear from thin air.

 

Vane turned with a flourish of his cutlass. Jack was just seconds behind, drawing his musket.

 

The abandoned tavern they’d walked into had swarmed to life with a plague of redcoats. The men turned in shock, clearly not expecting anyone to have remained awake. Vane dove into the skirmish with the blade of his cutlass, driving the blade into a man’s stomach, turning to block a rapier from his back, deflecting it and pressing onto an attack that pushed his opponent backwards.

 

“Jack!” He growled, his cutlass sinking through the man’s shoulder, “Go to the ship! Now! Warn the Captain!”

 

One of the redcoats made for Jack but was thrown back by a chest full of buckshot, “Are you fucking kidding me? I am not leaving you—“

 

Vane had just enough time to duck from the swipe of a rapier and he took his opponent by the knees. The man fell, screaming as the tendons in his leg snapped, “Then consider this a fucking order!”

 

Jack rolled his eyes. Another man came at him, screaming in fury, his eyes shot with bloodlust, his mouth twisted in a roar. Jack merely drew his musket and took out his frustration on the unfortunate man’s face. An order was, after all, an order. He turned, seeing his friend coming under a swarm of red. Jack had needed to urge his body to move forward. Had needed to tell himself Vane could take care of himself.

 

An order was an order. Next time he saw him, Jack swore he’d tell Vane he had an order of his own for him and where he could rightly go enact those orders.

 

Vane leapt to his feet. One of the redcoats, a young and green boy, stared at him in horror, desperately fumbling with the powder for his musket, nearly stumbling backwards in fear. Vane hesitated, for one moment wondering how old the boy could have been, how desperate the redcoats must have been to bring children into their employ.

 

In his hesitation, he never saw the man coming up behind him until he was nearly too late.

 

It was only when a large shadow enveloped him that Vane turned, just in time to see the rapier over his head.

 

Everything seemed to go deathly still in that moment. In a blink of an eye, Vane realised he was going to die.

 

And he realised, too, with a strange and peaceful sort of detachment, that he didn’t care.

 

He never closed his eyes. He watched the blade as if in slow motion.

 

Before the metal could meet him there was a terrible, horrifying scream.

 

A high, shrill sound, a woman’s sound, a girl’s sound, ringing terribly from towards the staircase.

 

Vane’s offender stopped, as did everyone, and turned to look at the source of the strange sound.

 

It had all happened so fast that Vane himself had not the time to react.

 

But someone else reacted for him.

 

In the brief moment where everyone had been stunned by the sudden interruption, something had gripped Vane by the wrist and dragged him away.

 

***

 

By the time he had sense of what had just happened and began to struggle, Vane found himself pushed through a crevice and tucked between the walls of the brothel. Dust and sand clogged the air, stung his eyes and burned at his lungs. He opened his mouth but got only another lungful of the vile dust so that a violent and painful cough racked through his whole body.

 

The sympathetic reply he got from the darkness was, “Be _quiet_! Or do you want them to find us?”

 

Vane could not see the source, but he would recognise that voice anywhere.

 

“You have _got_ to be fucking kidding me.”

 

His feet came to a halt in the corridor, his eyes adjusting enough to see the small figure before him.

 

“ _Doyouwanttogobackoutthere_?” Came the hiss from the darkness.

 

“I’m _thinking about it,”_ he hissed back.

 

A rat scurried overhead. A musket shot exploded through the wall, just barely missing the fat creature that made a dart for its life.

 

Vane didn’t talk then.

 

They came out the back of the brothel. Twilight had descended, clouding the city in a sunless light that grew dimmer by the second.

 

The girl was every bit as he’d remembered her, a thin will’o’wisp of a creature, tall for her age and still possessing traces of a boyish manner. Her taste in dress had apparently grown more ladylike in the past year, but the transformation seemed to have never expanded much further than her clothes, and indeed, she moved as though her crisp yellow dress was as comfortable for her as it would be to Rackham, and Vane could have sworn he heard her mutter a few curses as she balled up her skirts in her fist.

 

Urged by forces he could not explain, Vane smirked and said, “Having troubles, mistress Guthrie?”

 

The look she fixed him was absolutely poisonous. She raised a select finger to her lips and jerked her head to the side.

 

Four red coats had been posted guard outside the brothel, just barely outside of earshot.

 

Vane frowned, for carelessness had never been in his nature, and surely he should have caught their presence.

 

He frowned, but Eleanor—the thing, as he had dubbed her a little less than a year ago—did not give him too much time to think on this. Slowly she made her way away from the brothel, with the rehearsed ease of one accustomed to scampering about where she best ought not to, and lead him towards a grove of trees just ahead that was illuminated by a small line of torches dug into the sand.

 

She’d waited until the redcoats were out of earshot before Eleanor reached for one of the torches and handed it to Vane. This he took readily and without argument, but when it became clear that Eleanor intended on leading him into the dark jungle up ahead, Vane stopped.

 

“I’m not going to leave my men behind,” he hissed. He could count seven red coats on guard outside the brothel, maybe twelve inside when last he’d made count. His heart told him surely there must be some way to work those odds to his advantage, but his mind did not seem quite so convinced.

 

As though she could read those contents of his mind, Eleanor said, “What good will you do your men if you are caught?”

 

He opened his mouth to protest, but much to his annoyance, he found he had no refute for this.

 

“Live now,” the young girl whispered hotly, “and save your men later, or be caught now and die with them later.”

 

He glared at the girl for contradicting him, and begrudged her for giving voice to the nagging common sense he was trying so desperately to ignore. Regardless of his pride, he had to cede the girl’s point. He could save his men and hate her later.

 

That did not mean he had to like it, however.

 

Eleanor led him through a path that wound around a dense and suffocating jungle. Vane could feel his shoulders tense, his nerves jump on end. Indeed, as the trees whipped around them and he felt the faceless stares of the denizens of any thick jungle, Vane felt a knot deep within him that had nothing to do with the redcoats at his back or the hellion at his front. Memories pulled at him like the branches and thorns that clung to his body and tore at his clothes.

 

He focused on the creature before him, and found to some surprised that she was swiftfooted, even beholden to some degree of grace despite—or due to—her surroundings. She never seemed to notice the work the forest was doing on her fine dress, the way twigs and plants were snagging and tearing at the fine muslin, and Vane found himself wondering if this was the most unnatural woman he had ever come across, beyond even Bonny herself.

 

They walked in silence, and Vane tried to banish his memories of the last time he had made a trek through the dense, marshy bowels of a jungle. But he too was swiftfooted, and though he resented it deeply, he found himself moving with a certain ease in the jungle, for her found a familiarity there he despised bitterly. How many hours had he spent, after all, clawing through groves just like this, not allowing himself to dream that there might be anything at the end other than chains.

 

The ocean roared ahead. The moonless sky ahead, dotted with the faintest flicker of starlight, began breaking through the dense foliage. Soon, the jungle gave way and Vane found himself face to face with a cliff edge that gave way to a borderless expanse of the night ocean.

 

The cliff dropped some two hundred feet into an angry looking cluster of rocks down below. The light of the torch just barely grazed the waves that crashed and broke into blistering foam as the new tide pounded against the red rock.

 

Without even stopping to think about it, Eleanor turned, finding a small path that lead down the cliff edge. She looked at him and in the small, quivering light of the torch and he could just make out her features as she raised her brows, beckoning him forward.

 

It was this or another trek through the jungle into the grips of the redcoats.

 

Sighing, he followed her forward into a path that began slowly winding down the cliff.

 

“That screaming, was that—“

 

“I don’t scream.” Came the resolute voice, “That was my friend, Max.” Eleanor did not bother to look back at him, “To whom you owe your life.”

 

“I’ll be sure to thank her from the gallows.”

 

She laughed humourlessly, “My, you give up easy for a pirate.”

 

Unfortunately for her, the jibe had not worked on him as it might have his captain. Instead, he said, “Do you have a plan?”

 

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.”

 

At this point the ocean was roaring in their ears. Waves crashed against the cliff face and sprayed them with salt and water, causing the flame he held above his head to kick violently. A small fork in the path lead them back up to the Island main, onto a secluded cove lined with sharp rocks.

 

“Your plan being?”

 

Eleanor looked to him, her smile as innocent and smug as when he’d watch her bewitch the man they called the pirate king, “And I should tell you and spoil the fun?”

 

Vane never noticed how he straightened his back when she looked at him, never noticed how squared his shoulders. Short, she’d called him. He smirked, deliberately looking down at her. “Why should I go along with a plan I don’t know?”

 

Eleanor huffed, throwing her nose in the air, “No one’s forcing you. You are more than welcome to return to the main thoroughfare. Fighting the way you did, there’s a good chance you might make it a whole two minutes—“

 

Vane’s free hand shot out to grab her before Eleanor could finish her carefully constructed diatribe. Her eyes widened in outrage, but before she could vocalise her indignation, Vane went ahead and clamped his hand over her mouth, pulling her to him until her back was flush against his chest.

 

Somewhere beyond the white hot blaze of her outrage, Eleanor noticed to her great dismay that the annoying cabin boy was no longer as short as she remembered.

 

But that, she decided, was a problem for later.

 

Vane’s attention was elsewhere, and he was only vaguely aware that clamping his hand over the girl’s mouth had done little good. She squirmed and elbowed and shouldered and fidgeted in his grasp like some eel possessed, and even with his hand over her mouth she managed to yell, seemingly not caring one iota that her words just came out as muffled noises of outrage.

 

“Shut _up_ ,” Vane whispered.

 

Fed up with the manhandling, and the inability to hurl insults, Eleanor clamped down on the hand that smothered her with her teeth.

 

It took every ounce of willpower Vane had in his possession to not yelp in surprise, if not for pain. He drew his hand back, baring his teeth in a hiss. His grip, however, only tightened on her.

 

“Get your hands off me,” she hissed back.

 

Before he could respond, Vane’s head shot up, his sharp features casting dark shadows under the flickering golden light of the torch above them, “Do you hear that?”

 

“I can’t hear anything because you are smothering me,” Eleanor growled.

 

Vane found himself battling a losing fight as his concentration was torn between the small bundle of irritation and petticoats in his arms and the looming threat trekking through the jungle, “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.”

 

“I should have helped the tall scraggly one and left you to the redcoats.”

 

“That sounds like your mistake,” Vane said, though not looking at her.

 

This time, even Eleanor heard the cracking of twigs, the snapping of branches just up ahead.

 

Vane let her go, both of them seeking cover under the protective shadow of a large rock that jutted out from the beach.

 

Within moments, torches lit up the night sky, and a gaggle of redcoats emerged from the jungle. Eleanor looked up at Vane and gestured towards a small path on the opposite end of the cove.

 

Once there, Eleanor stepped up on to the rock.

 

“Drop the torch into the water or they’ll see us moving by the flame.”

 

Vane’s eyes widened, “Are you completely mad? It’s dark as death out here, we’ll walk right into the goddamn sea.”

 

The redcoats drew further into the cove. To Vane’s horror, he watched as one of the men pointed to the fresh set of footprints he and Eleanor had left behind in the wet sand.

 

The wet set of footprints that lead right to where they stood.

 

Eleanor must have figured the same thing for she said, “I know this Island, I know its every rock, and I know its every path.”

 

Vane hesitated.

 

Eleanor reached out her hand to him, “Do you trust me?”

 

He swung around to look at her then, for surely the girl must have been joking in that bizarre and impish sense of humour of hers. But her eyes were earnest, her expression as serene as he had ever seen it.

 

His response was a vehement, “No I don’t fucking trust you, are you insane?”

 

Eleanor shrugged, “Well, then this is going to be really difficult for you.”

 

Taking advantage of his shock, Eleanor reached for the torch in his hands and yanked it from his hand. Before Vane had time to react she had hurled the thing into the ocean, the flame disappearing under the rise and fall of a wave.

 

A deep and terrible darkness enveloped Vane.

 

The world had disappeared before his eyes, swallowed by the moonless night.

 

Vane could hear the cries and the midnight screams of the jungle just up ahead.

 

The redcoats mumbled just up close. He could hear their muffled voices drawing closer and closer. He could hear the swipe of their breeches against their sabres, the rattling of the pouches filled with gunpowder.

 

Wrapped in darkness, Vane could only be aware that something was coming for him, that death loomed just ahead and he stood there blind and open, waiting for something he could not see.

 

And then a hand reached out for him in the darkness.

 

Vane’s breath caught. Eleanor grabbed him by the hand, her grip strong and demanding. She pulled him forward. In one step the sand beneath his feet gave way to a rock, and then another, and then another. He could feel the roar of the ocean to his side, the spray at his heels.

 

When Vane looked over his shoulder, he saw the redcoat’s flames disappear behind the pitch black edge of the cliff.

 

With another step, Vane followed Eleanor into the darkness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	10. Chapter 10 : Fire in the Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do apologise for the delay in this particular chapter. I am still searching for a beta reader, so if you feel like that's something you might enjoy please let me know!
> 
> With this chapter we've broken 100k! Thank you so much to all of you who have supported this plucky little novel. To each and every one of you who have read this through to 100k, to each and every one of you who have taken the time to leave a kudos, to those of you who have left such wonderful and in depth feedback, thank you so much. Without each and every one of you, there is no story. Without you, this would not exist. So thank you so much for giving me this opportunity, and I hope you enjoy the coming chapters!

CHAPTER SIX

FIRE IN THE NIGHT

 

The ocean’s roar seemed amplified three fold in the cramped and lightless caverns so that the very sea seemed turned into some great beast that roared at their back. They walked upon a slippery ledge that hugged the side of the cave, each careful step echoing off the walls around them. Even here, the ocean followed Vane, snaking below them into the cave it had carved out and sending a hollow and pounding echo against the walls as they walked deeper and deeper into the beating heart of Nassau.

 

Neither spoke, and as Vane’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could just make out Eleanor’s small figure moving nimbly ahead of him, being either completely unaware of the darkness or having become accustomed to it long ago. His hand traced their path on the wall, hundreds of years of dripping water and algae slipping against his palm. And then, suddenly, the slimy wall was gone. Vane turned, still half blind in the blue darkness, and he could just make out the dark silhouette where the wall gave way to a tunnel.

 

He turned then, but a small hand yanked at his shirt. “Wrong way,” Eleanor’s boyish voice came, her commanding tone amplified by the red rock around them.

 

Vane frowned in the darkness, “Where does it lead?”

 

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

 

Before Vane could come up with any sort of retort, Eleanor’s figure was already walking ahead of him. Though this time, much to his confusion, her small hand had not let his shirt go, taking the liberty of dragging him behind her once more. He was just about to protest when Eleanor stopped. Once more there was a hiccup in the cave’s walls, though this one was half the size of the last one, too small even for the young Eleanor.

 

Vane could only make out the shadow before him sinking down to the ground and he figured the girl must have sunk onto her hands and knees, a sight he knew would have provided him with ample cause to mock the arrogant chit could he only just see her. The shadow stopped, and Vane got the keen sense that she was watching him, waiting for him to do something.

 

“Well?” Came the impatient hiss.

 

“You can’t possibly expect me to follow you onto the damn floor and into a wall without knowing where it leads.”

 

“You know, you’re right. How terribly silly of me. Tell you what, why don’t you just saunter on back out there, walk back to the beach and explain all this to the English sailors there.”

 

She didn’t even wait for his response, and to this Vane took great offense, for he got the distinct feeling that Eleanor had moved ahead because she thought she knew exactly what his decision would be. The sheer principle of it was enough to make him actually contemplate doing exactly what she’d said, just out of spite. He stopped, realizing the utter and complete absurdity of the thought, and wondering how in the hell the girl had even compelled him to consider such a thing in the first place.

 

He sank to the floor after her, too stunned by his own strange turn of thought to grumble. Vane was not a particularly arrogant man, but surely he knew himself to be smarter than this. How was it that after one year the girl still seemed to have the ability to compel him to act like… His mind went blank. He didn’t even know what it was the girl compelled him to, but, as with all things out of his control, he did not like it.

 

Even on his hands and knees, Vane could still feel the rough scratch of the low ceiling on his back. They continued that way in silence, and in the cramped darkness it was only the shuffle of cotton and petticoats that let him know Eleanor was still there, just ahead of him.

 

“You know,” he started, once again compelled by those demonic, otherworldly forces that compel all teenage boys to say the worst possible things at the worst possible times, “If this is just some elaborate ruse to get me to stare at your arse, there are far easier alternatives that don’t involve us making our way into the goddamn under—“

 

Vane had only the slightest hint of a movement in the darkness, but years fighting shadows had honed his reflexes too well for Eleanor, and he just managed to dodge and evade several backward kicks from a slippered foot.

 

Now that Vane had succeeded in getting a rise out of the girl, he felt somewhat more at peace.

 

At first, Vane felt his eyes must have been adjusting to the light, for suddenly he could make Eleanor’s outline with much more clarity before him. But soon it became clear that it was not his eyes that were becoming adjusted to the darkness, and though he had to blink to be sure, Vane could make out the outline of a faint and greenish glow seeping in around Eleanor. Surely it couldn’t have been the rising sun, could it? How long had they been in those damned caves?

 

He wasn’t even given the time to ask, for the cave opened up before them. Eleanor rose ahead of him and stepped into the strange glowing light.

 

When Vane emerged from the tunnel, his back seemingly on fire, he felt sure that indeed the girl must have lead him into the underworld, for what he saw before him could not possibly belong to the realm of men.

 

The tunnel opened up into a cave that was split through the middle by a slow moving tributary off the ocean. The calm water turned into a mirror that reflected a flickering, glowing light that shone from every conceivable surface of the cave- the walls, the ceilings, the long stalactites that stabbed from above. The light glowed a vivid blue green that was the colour of the sea, bathing the darkness and the cave in a pulsating and flickering blue light.

 

Vane turned to Eleanor and found she had been watching him with a keen, amused interest. His shock must have shown on his face, for the girl smiled then, glowing with a light that had nothing to do with the strange cave around them.

 

She stood there there, smiling at him with a light in her eyes and her pale features bathed in a light that glowed with the colour of flowing water, and not for the first time did he wonder whether the girl was entirely human. Though, from the tales he had heard from his crew, Eleanor could not possibly be a siren. Too flat chested, for one thing.

 

“What is this?”

 

Eleanor shook her head, “I’m not entirely sure. It’s an animal, I think. A form of worm that becomes a moth.”

 

A memory tugged at the corner of Vane’s mind, “I saw something like this once,” he said, almost to himself, “on the Indian Ocean. We were out in still waters, no land around us for miles, no ship whose light we could see, no moon on the sky. And the next thing we knew, the Ocean had started glowing all around us, as vivid as moonlight.”

 

It was Eleanor’s turn to stare in wonder.

 

She suddenly jumped up, and reached for something within the walls.

 

She came back to him and fell with little grace onto her knees before him with cupped hands, her skin and fair hair glowing as a fae. She reached her hands before him, cupped closed. She looked at him, “Here, close your hands around mine.”

 

Vane stared at her for a minute. Lost in the strange new world into which he’d emerged, he felt a strange hesitation. It was the first time he’d gotten a look at Eleanor Guthrie in one year. Though she had not grown up, or out, he could now see the features that were beginning to bloom from childhood. Her face was beginning to lose the softness of a child, the angles of her features taking on the sharp and graceful lines that held in them a promise of the woman hiding behind the mischievous and impish smile.

 

Suddenly the tales of the sea he’d brushed off from his crewmen all came back to him and Vane found himself wishing he’d paid more attention, though the general gist to their stories seemed to always be the same: The more otherworldly the woman, the more enticing her promise, the more terrible the fate. Vane stared down at Eleanor’s hands before him.

 

To Vane’s great relief, Eleanor grew impatient, and whatever feminine mystique he mistakenly thought he saw upon her face quickly disappeared with a roll of her eyes. “Oh, come on, you can’t tell me you’re scared!”

 

“I’m not scared.”

 

“Then, what, don’t tell me you’re afraid to touch a woman’s hands!”

 

“Were there a woman here I’d have no such fear. But I have often heard the hands of children are sticky and unpleasant.” And with that, and all was right with the world again.

“You know, just because—“ she stopped, and here she turned a curious shade of red that left Vane with a terrible curiosity to know what it was that had just flitted through her mind, but Eleanor went on before he could question her, “—Just because it’s been one year that doesn’t suddenly make you all that much older than me. I’ve grown every bit as you have.”

 

Vane scoffed, “I hardly think so.”

 

Eleanor switched tactics, “Look, if you’re scared, then—“

 

“How many times do I have to tell you, I’m not scared.”

 

“Prove it, then.”

 

Eleanor smiled in challenge, holding out her closed hands again. Vane met her eyes and the challenge there.

 

His hands wrapped around hers and, much to his chagrin, found they were not, in fact, the sticky and unpleasant hands of a child.

 

“Alright,” Eleanor went on, and for the first time Vane was glad of the sound of her nagging and commanding voice that reminded him he found her irritating, “I’m going to take my hands out. As soon as they leave yours you must close them tightly, but keeping your palms apart, like a cup, understand?”

 

He nodded.

 

He felt a shift in Eleanor’s hands, as though she were dropping something onto his own, though he could feel no weight indicate that she had given him anything. Eleanor’s hands quickly slid from his and he did as she’d instructed.

 

Vane stared at his hands, wondering if all this had been some strange trick.

 

“Alright, now open your hands.”

 

Vane did so and there, hovering between his palms, was a little flitting point of bluish light, shining against his skin as a star plucked from the sky, and about no bigger.

 

In his wonder of the moment, a memory struck him from the years.

 

“I’ve seen this before,” he frowned, working through his memories, “It was at night, at dusk. Over the water. I thought I must have been seeing things.” He looked at his hands. He thought he had been hallucinating then. A young boy, watching stars that danced over the water. He dismissed it as soon as he’d seen it, for surely nothing quite so beautiful could exist on that hellish Island situated as it was over the mouth of Hell.

 

But there was nothing imaginary about the tiny little creature lazily flittering between his palms, completely unworried about the beast over it that could kill it with just a flick of his wrists. It seemed every bit as comfortable in his bloodstained hands as--

 

Vane looked back up and found Eleanor was smiling, “You’re talking about something different,” she jumped to her feet, “Come on!”

 

Before he could question her, Eleanor had dashed off, disappearing into the cave. Vane leapt to his feet, the small creature he’d held hovering in unworried circles where Vane had sat.

 

“Look here, as much fun as this tour is, when are we---“

 

Vane’s voice trailed off when he came to stand next to Eleanor and followed the path of her gaze.

 

The cave opened into a cliff edge that overlooked a lake sunken into the earth. The water from the cave followed them and fell down to the lake below in a shimmering cascade that glowed with starlight. The air was heavy with the crisp and green smell of wet earth and those flowers that only bloomed in the darkness of the night. All around the lake, the earth rose in a lush, vibrant and swaying thicket of tropical green trees and lush ferns sleeping through the dark night. As though the starlight from the sky above fell with the cascade, small pinpoints of green light flickered on and off, on and off, just centimetres above the water’s surface.

 

“Fireflies. Were those what you’d seen?”

 

Vane nodded.

 

“Where was it that you saw them?”

 

All Eleanor got by way of a response was the roar of the water that fell down below and the chirps and songs of the cicadas who made their home by waterfront.

 

She turned to demand an answer, but Vane was not staring at her. He could feel the weight of Eleanor’s gaze upon his face but found he could not turn to her then, could not turn from the ghosts he saw on that water, hiding in the shadow of that jungle.

 

“This is my favourite part of the Island, you know.” She said as though nothing had happened, “Nobody knows about it.”

 

The lake stretched out before them with all the beauty of a lush Eden plunged into a purple light that flickered with fireflies. The grove was nestled amidst rolling hills carpeted with the lush forest, and must have, indeed, been invisible to those who did not know the Island.

 

It was strange, Vane thought. Though he would not deny the beauty of the place before him, it must have been entirely similar to the Island where he’d been kept as slave and prisoner. And yet looking before him now at the trees that swayed gently with an ocean breeze and the lake that lapped at the red earth, Vane could feel none of the fear or disgust he had felt for Albinus’ dominion, though the two places must have been downright identical.

 

“Why help me?” Vane asked.

 

Eleanor sat down next to the mouth of the waterfall, her feet and legs hanging off the side.

 

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, her voice hard, “I never do anything without expecting something in return.”

 

When Eleanor did not continue, Vane turned to her, “Well?”

 

Eleanor sighed, “Your men were not the only ones captured. Among them is someone very near and dear to me. Someone I care about a great deal.”

 

For reasons he could not explain, Vane felt a strange disappointment when he’d heard those words, though he could not and did not wish to understand why. “And who would he be?”

 

“His name is Mr. Scott. He was taken when the Navy arrived, as a guarantee of my father’s cooperation.”

 

Vane did not bother to feign surprise, “So your father knew about this?”

 

Eleanor nodded, “It’s stupid, really. They had no need to take Mr. Scott. So long as my father still thinks he can be made governor, he’d roll over on his back if the Admiral so asked him. Or onto his stomach, as the case may be.”

 

“There’s something I don’t understand.”

 

Eleanor looked up, “Yes?”

 

Vane turned to Eleanor then, “If they wished to guarantee your cooperation, why take this Mr. Scott? Why not take you?”

 

Her smile was hard, brittle, and there was nothing amused in her laugh, “Because they know my father far too well.”

 

Vane stared at her as though he had just seen something interesting. But when Eleanor turned to him, he turned away from her.

 

“Why go to all this extent for just some pirates?”

 

“When the war with the French was going, it was easy to ignore the acts of pirates. But with the war over, people need a new spectacle.

 

The same men whom the newspapers had harkened as heroes have now become bloodthirsty murderers, acts that were daring are now barbaric, and the people from the colonies to England want to know what kind of a government could let these foul creatures prey upon the good and weak.

 

Of all the pirates on the sea, the decision has been made that it is Henry Avery who must sacrifice his blood to sate the people. That way, the governors get a good show, and the Royal India Company and the Board of Trade get something to take back to the Indian royal family as a sign of good will, and trade can continue in peace.”

 

Vane looked away then, vaguely reminiscent of his Captain’s act when it came to hiding their past, “And what does Henry Avery have to do with us?” He said, not even trying to sound believable.

 

Eleanor laughed, “What indeed!”

 

One look at her and he knew it was pointless to try and carry on the ruse, and though he didn’t like it, he found he felt the slightest and nagging shred of respect for the girl who was not half as stupid as he wished she was.

 

He laughed at the ludicrousness of the charade, the ludicrousness of his situation, the ludicrousness of the strange world that had claimed him for its own. “When did you know?”

 

“The first time I saw you on that boat, rowing to shore.”

 

His eyebrows went up then, “You lie. Surely it was Hornigold who told you.”

 

She looked at him, “I’ve grown up on this Island. You must think yourself terribly clever, or think me profoundly stupid, to believe I would have fallen for the ruse. Hell, to believe that anyone would have fallen for the ruse.”

 

“Is that so, Miss. Guthrie? Tell me, then, how did you so masterfully deduce our deception?”

 

She smiled then, full of self-satisfaction, “Your clothes, for one. All accounts of Henry Avery and his men had him going down from the North African coast, to South Africa, through India, and back through Port Elizabeth. The clothes you and your men were wearing followed that route exactly. You carried upon you Arabian clothes, African weapons, and Indian jewelry.”

 

Vane cocked his head to the side, “Many men follow that exact same route in trade. We could have just as easily been coming back from a trading expedition.”

 

Eleanor’s eyes took on an intense sharpness, her smile hardening when she saw he would not go down so easily, “Your ship, then. The damage done to the masts and sails.”

 

“We could have been attacked,” and here he smiled, “by pirates.”

 

Eleanor scoffed, “Hardly! Most of the damage I saw on your ship was from battle, offensive wounds. The floors near the cannons were nearly withered, your powder stores almost entirely depleted. Yet what few defensive wounds you carried were largely superficial, and the sides of the ship were covered with powder burns from close range shots. Were you trying to fend off attackers, you would have sustained damage from afar, not from up close. The damage I saw must have happened when you were nearing a ship with the intention of boarding, not when you were trying to fend someone off in the hopes that they would keep their distance.”

 

Vane stared at her then, and he saw Eleanor’s victory bloom across her face when he could find no response for her logic. “That is… Oddly impressive.”

 

Eleanor’s feet kicked at the edge of the cliff happily, “I know my ships, Mr. Vane.”

 

He shook his head, “One day, you are going to tell me how you came to know this. I cannot imagine you manage to pepper your time between dancing lessons and embroidery by sailing.”

 

“Should we survive tonight, I’ll think about telling you. One day.” She smiled like a cat, mischievous and cunning, “Maybe.”

 

“ _We_?”

 

Eleanor stared up at him as though he grew a second head, “Ofcourse. You are not going by yourself.”

 

Vane looked at her as though she had gone utterly insane, “Miss Guthrie, I think I can handle myself.”

 

“I don’t give a shit if you can handle yourself, I’m going because I want to.”

 

“Absolutely not. You’ll only get in the way.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Eleanor smiled a vicious smile, “Then you tell me, where are they keeping the prisoners?”

 

Vane opened his mouth then clearly though the better of his response, closed it, and finally said, “I don’t know but I will find out.”

 

“How?”

 

He looked at her with what he clearly considered to be his most threatening look, “You’ll tell me.”

 

His most threatening look did not, in fact, work as he’d hoped, for her voice dripped with so much sarcasm it was a wonder the chit didn’t drown in it, “Will I really?”

 

Now it was his turn to switch tactics, “You will if you want to see your Mr. Scott again.”

 

“If I don’t go with you, what’s to stop you from grabbing your men and leaving him behind?”

 

“You have my word.”

 

“Words are meaningless. The only thing you can trust is what you see.”

 

“Then that,” he ground out through clenched teeth, his patience growing thin as blow after verbal blow seemed to fly past the girl with all the threat and malice of a warm spring breeze, “as you said earlier, is going to make things very difficult for you.”

 

“Has it even occurred to you that I can simply choose to not tell you where they are?”

 

“Has it even occurred to you that I can simply choose to push you off this cliff?”

 

“And I’d still not talk!”

 

“Fine,” he sighed, pressing his hand against his closed eyes and the headache that was suddenly sitting right there, “I can push you off the cliff and _then_ find out where they are through some other means.”

 

“Say you do. Then what?”

 

“Then I kill every guard and get my men out.”

 

Eleanor smiled then, and Vane did not like it for one moment, “Like you were so successfully doing at the tavern?”

 

“I was doing very well.” He paused, muttering under his breath, “Until I wasn’t.”

 

“Until you weren’t.” Eleanor parroted with a smirk.

 

A long silence stretched between them.

 

“You still want to push me off this cliff?”

 

“God, but I really do.”

 

“You won’t though, will you?” She made it a question and Vane felt that headache he had not in precisely one year’s time.

 

“Some ground rules, then.”

 

Eleanor gave out a sharp burst of a laugh, “You think you’re setting up the rules!”

 

“Fine!” He burst out, “What would you say?”

 

“We set a fire by way of distraction, an old storage shed near entrance.”

 

Vane tried to sound vaguely disinterested, “Entrance to where?”

 

“Nice try.” Eleanor went on, “If the men don’t go to aid stopping it, they should at least clear out the area where the men are being held to send communication to the rest of their crew. We sneak in, we sneak them out. We do not engage the sailors, do you understand me?”

 

Vane smiled, and he knew it was not pleasant, “Oh, I understand you.”

 

***

 

It had felt strange leading Vane through the tunnels of Nassau, a dark world that had been Eleanor’s sole refuge and secret. She knew its every passage by heart, tunnels and accessways that even Hornigold, the only other person aware that such tunnels vaguely existed, did not know about. And Eleanor had had no intention of telling him, or anyone else for that matter. So why had it been different for Vane?

 

She told herself over and over again as she wandered through those dark corridors that it was only because she had no other choice, that it was because he was the only one left after the attack on the tavern. And surely she had had plenty of reason to go to the tavern, for there was no way she could free Mr. Scott by herself. And that was the only reason she had waited there, hidden among the balconies, watching as wave after wave of Jennings’ men were poisoned and dragged to the fortress, looking among the drunk and rowdy men for the scowling face and peculiar eyes of the one boy among the camps who had refused to do as she bid him.

 

But an annoying voice in the back of her mind seemed to laugh every time she thought she had found a fool proof way to justify her actions to herself.

 

And so, as was Eleanor’s tendency when faced with something she did not wish to acknowledge, that Eleanor merely told herself that this mystery too she would add to her growing list of things she’d think about later.

 

She led them through the tunnel that Vane had nearly wandered through earlier, the tunnel that she knew well, the tunnel that if taken straight ahead would lead to the dungeons. But not yet. For it was as a soft and hazy golden light began to creep through the shadows, evidence of torches just ahead, that another tunnel opened in the wall. And here she had beckoned Vane to be very careful, and very quiet, and she’d found to her great surprise that, as though sensing the danger around them, he had already taken it upon himself to blend as seamlessly into the shadows as though he were one of them, and even she had a hard time discerning his figure in the darkness, were it not for those clear eyes that caught the light of the flames just ahead of them.

 

There must have been a scant handful of men in the courtyard, seven at most, and most had already found the stash of rum that had been Hornigold’s not-so-secret pride. So, already far past drunk, they had never noticed the figures that snuck around the brim of the courtyard. Never noticed the hands that reached for a torch. Never noticed the roar of flame as a derelict wagon caught its first taste of flame.

 

By the time the alarms had been set, the flames were already jumping from the wagon to tables, to old wooden crates and rum soaked chests that sent the fire kicking into the sky.

 

***

 

Another hidden tunnel had lead them up to the roof of the fortress. From there, Eleanor had watched the blaze and the English sailors slowly begin the chain of reaction she had counted on, biding her time until she could be sure that all the men had been flooded out into the courtyard. But Vane had stared out at the harbour, where the Fancy was the only ship on the water.

 

“I don’t understand,” he whispered, “How did we not see them?”

 

Eleanor turned, and upon Vane’s face there was such a raw and terrible expression that she found her earlier antagonism giving way. “They were counting on you coming ashore,” she whispered gently, “That wouldn’t have happened if you’d seen an English galleon waiting for you, so they docked on the other side of the Island, near New Adelaide.”

 

Vane frowned, “But why would they need us to come ashore?”

 

“The warrant was written for the land of New Providence. So long as your men stay on that ship, beyond English waters, they are legally out of the admiral’s reach. If the admiral were to take a merchant vessel with no proof of piracy, the Board of Trade would have to face the wrath of every sea Captain and tradesman who would rather not be subject to random seizures.”

 

There was a grim silence. Eleanor turned then but Vane did not look at her. The blood had drained from Vane’s face until the only colour there was flickering orange light of the blaze below. A great and terrible guilt seemed to overtake his expression, and Eleanor watched as he suddenly seemed to turn years younger right before her eyes.

 

“You had no way of knowing.”

 

Vane turned then and Eleanor saw the question in his eyes that glowed with the colour of fire. She knew it had been him who’d ordered Rackham to go tell their Captain what had happened. And she knew too that no Captain could hear his men were under attack and sit idly in his ship.

 

Eleanor had always prided herself on her ability to be blunt, and yet, staring at those troubled eyes, she found that for the first time she could not bring herself to simply blurt out the simple truth; that his fears were justified, that his Captain had probably been captured, and on his orders. Instead she said, “You were only trying to warn your captain,” she said, “You did what you had to do.”

 

She could not understand why, at that moment, it seemed so terribly important that this insufferable creature who defied her at every turn not blame himself. It was late, she thought. And she was scared, and tired, and hungry, and probably not thinking rationally. Surely that could account for it.

 

He did not respond to her attempts to comfort him, but merely said in a voice that seemed to boil with heat, “Where are they keeping the prisoners?”

 

***

 

It is a strange fact of life that we often do not know when we are putting into motion the makings of our own downfall. It was on that hot and moonless night that Eleanor Guthrie led Charles Vane through the tunnels that linked Nassau’s fortress to its dungeons for the first time. They passed in the darkness without a word, passing gates that no one yet thought to lock and doors that would remain closed for years ahead, waiting patiently for the day to come when they might be opened to unleash from their recesses the chaos that would destroy a Nassau not yet built. Maybe it was at that moment when one desperate act of trust between two strangers set forth a cruel game between fate and the wills of men who refused to be pawns to forces they could not control.

 

But right then, neither Eleanor nor Charles could have any notion of what it was they had begun. For they were young yet, and beholden to that particular arrogance of youth that can only see what lies directly in front of it, believing that their entire existence relies solely on those events whose consequences are immediately felt.

 

And so they walked on, their only purpose being the release of those people who had taken the place of the parent either child had since lost long ago, and only in the back of their mind were they aware of one another, and there they were riddled with those questions neither thought to answer or acknowledge in the hopes that time might prove the best cure for that which they did not deign to face.

 

Once it was that they had reached their destination, they dashed past a storeroom that had been lit with a few lamps. Lining the corridor outside were fresh barrels of powder and hay that had yet to be stored.

 

Beyond that was the door to the dungeons, flanked on either side by lamps still flickering and books still left open were the guards had been sitting just moments ago.

 

Vane and Eleanor walked into that long stretch of corridor, lined on either side with long abandoned cells. At the end of the room they could hear voices. They could hear voices arguing.

 

“I should have never let you come back!” Here Eleanor recognised Hornigold’s voice.

 

“Let me come back? Let me? Good God, man! You have a fully stocked fort and still the Navy managed to get past you, take Nassau, and lock you up in your own damnable fort!” Here Vane recognised Jennings’s voice.

 

“What the hell kind of traitor do you take me for that I would point a cannon at our own goddamn Navy?” Hornigold bellowed from the cell he shared with Mr. Scott.

 

“I’m not saying you should have shot them, you old fool. A few grazing shots next to the ocean should have done the job just fine.” Jennings retorted from the cell he shared with a handful of his men.

 

“Um, gentlemen?” Came Mr. Scott’s voice.

 

It was ignored.

 

“I am the old fool? I’m the old fool. It was you who lead them right to us, you old fool!”

 

“Me? I lead them to Nassau? I wasn’t even _in_ Nassau!”

 

“Well apparently when you took some ship of the Navy you must have written ‘ _Destination : Nassau’_ on your maps in great big fucking letters because they knew you were coming here!”

 

“Um, Captain—“ Came the voice of one of Jennings’ men.

 

It, too, was ignored.

 

“Well at least my men were capable of capturing a ship instead of being captured by a ship! _A_ ship, man! Not even a fleet!”

 

“Well at least I can spot a goddamn galleon hiding behind some fucking bushes and a handful of Quakers!”

 

“Gentlemen—“

 

“Captain—“

 

Jennings and Hornigold turned in a perfectly synchronized, “ _WHAT_?” But either man found his cell mates were not staring at him, but rather straight ahead.

 

It was only then when Hornigold and Jennings realised they had company.

 

Eleanor and Vane both looked on, and on their faces they wore the expression every teenager delights in, the expression of watching two adults make utter asses of themselves.

 

“Captain,” Vane nodded.

 

“Captain Hornigold,” Eleanor smiled.

 

Hornigold’s face flushed a bright red down to the ears, and Jennings had the look of a man who had just swallowed a sea slug.

 

“How did—“ Jennings begun.

 

“Hah!” Hornigold bellowed, “That’s my girl!” Hornigold flashed the wall a smug look, as though it could somehow penetrate the stone and slap Jennings in the face, “That girl can get in and out of anything. I taught her that, you know!”

 

“With some help! It’d take a lot more than the Navy to keep my Quartermaster back, English or no!” Jennings retorted in equal fashion to the equally solid and decidedly impenetrable stone wall.

 

“Well it was _my_ —“

 

“Do you think you two can behave, or are we going to have to leave you in there a little while longer?” Vane smirked.

 

Jennings shot his quartermaster a warning look, but Vane did not even try to look apologetic in the least. No, he did not even bother to hide the enjoyment he was deriving from all this.

 

“Just…” Jennings sighed, “Get us out of here.”

 

Eleanor fished a small set of keys from her pocket, tossing one to Vane and keeping the other for herself.

 

Hornigold went white, “Where did you get those?”

 

“We are all beholden to our secrets, Captain,” Eleanor murmured in a singsong voice that Vane was glad wasn’t aimed at him for once.

 

The lock to Jennings’ cell gave way, and in there Vane found that his Captain was watching him as though he were seeing him for the first time.

 

One of the men, however, an oarsman by the name of Mr. Mitchell who had a body like a bear and small beady features set in the middle of a face like a red potato blurted out, “What in the fuck took you so long?”

 

Vane gestured with a cock of his head beyond aforementioned impregnable wall, “Playing governess to Little-Miss-No-Tits over there.”

 

Jennings swung around in a double take, sure that his ears had played a sudden trick on him. Surely he could not have just heard what he thought he heard, surely not from Vane of all people. Clearly he had been locked in that cell far too long. But then there came a voice,

 

“I heard that, you ape!” A disembodied but no less angry voice responded from the opposite side of the wall.

 

Jennings looked from the wall back to Vane. Had he heard right? No, the girl must have meant someone else. One of his other men had spoken, had to be.

 

One of the men shook his head, patting Vane on the shoulder as he got out of the cell, “Rackham still has a lot to teach you about women.”

 

“I don’t know what would give you that impression, I haven’t dealt with a woman since we made port.”

 

“Say that to my face, I dare you!” Returned the disembodied response.

 

This time it was one of the men who responded as though in a physical sort of pain, “Oh, that is just not smart.”

 

Jennings could feel that he had gone slack jawed, but he found he could do nothing about it. He would have expected such a juvenile and downright boyish response from any other creature on his ship, upon this Island, upon this earth, but surely not his quartermaster.

 

Meanwhile, it was taking Hornigold and Mr. Scott both to keep the girl from dashing out of the cell and seeking justified and bloody retribution. Mr. Scott sank to his knees and turned Eleanor to face him, “Eleanor, is this true? You were with this boy, of the Diamond’s crew?”

 

“Yes,” she said without a trace of apology, adding in a rising voice meant to travel across walls, “and I should have left him at the tavern to get poisoned!”

 

“It would have been preferable to having to stare at your arse for the eternity we were in that tunnel!” Came the response.

 

“Vane, what is going on with you?” Came another voice Eleanor could only barely recognise.

 

Though Hornigold was looking at the girl as one does a clay vase that they managed to build without having it collapse on itself, Mr. Scott’s expression only held a troubled and worried look. A look that Eleanor feared usually preluded a very stern, very long, lecture, the kind that begins with—

 

“Young lady—“

 

Before he could start, Eleanor pulled him by his arm, beckoning him to get up and follow her, “Come on, I don’t know how long our distraction will hold.”

 

“Distraction?” Hornigold frowned, “What dis—

 

Before Hornigold could finish, voices began to filter down the hall from the outside.

 

“Did they already put out the fire?” Eleanor asked halfway to herself, though even she knew it wasn’t really a question.

 

Hornigold’s face blanched, “Fire? What fire?”

 

Vane did not look up from the empty cell where Jennings and the men had been, and though she could not see his face, Eleanor felt something like a shift in the air around him. It were as if whatever levity had just possessed him had disappeared as surely as though it had never been there in the first place. When she drew nearer she could see him scanning the cell, looking in the shadows for what she knew not.

 

“Follow Hornigold,” Vane said, and Eleanor was not sure if he spoke to her or his Captain or both, “he should lead the way.”

 

Hornigold, however, was still looking from Vane to Eleanor, “What fire?”

 

Jennings grabbed Hornigold and shoved him forward, “Talk about the fire later.”

 

Nobody saw the look Jennings had shot Vane. Nobody saw how Vane had not been able to look up at his Captain, lost as he was looking for something in the darkness.

 

Though he looked none the happier for it, Hornigold obliged, leading the men down the hallway.

 

But they were too late.

 

Vane and Eleanor both stepped out just in time to come between the prisoners and three guards who were looking at them in stunned silence.

 

Vane turned to shoot Jennings a look that made his Captain’s heart go cold.

 

“Vane—“ He shouted in a low warning, but it was too late.

 

Vane grabbed the hay that was overflowing from one of the nearby barrels, holding it to the lamps until the fire caught.

 

The guards reached for their muskets, “Calm now, boy, if you’d just—“

 

They slowly began to make their way forward, each step as careful as though they were dealing with a skittish animal.

 

Eleanor caught a flicker of Vane’s eyes. A cold terror gripped her, “Don’t—“

 

Vane threw open the lid of one of the barrels of powder, dropping the lit hay inside and quickly replacing the lid. The guards had no time to understand what was even happening before he tipped the barrel over and, with a kick, sent it rolling towards them.

 

Eleanor’s eyes widened, “What did—“

 

He gave her no time to finish. As Eleanor stood there, frozen with shock, he ran towards her, grabbing her without stopping.            

 

It all happened as though in slow motion. The barrel slowly rolled towards the guards. The guards watched it as though in a trance.

 

There was a flash of light, and then a deafening, roaring explosion. The ground bucked beneath them and the air became heavy with dust and debris, though, by some incredible stroke of luck or Dutch masonry, the fort held. Eleanor fell to the ground, a heavy weight upon her back. She’d had just enough time to feel the wind escape her lungs when a searing heat exploded from behind her, washing over her until she felt as though her very skin were on fire. Her eyes shut tightly, as though if only she could hold them closed long enough, she would wake up and find that all this had been but the bizarre mirage of a dream.

 

When Eleanor opened her eyes, she was lying on the floor. She looked up without moving, seeing Jennings, Hornigold, Mr. Scott and the few men who had shared a cell with their Captain. All of them were on the ground, moaning, but alive.

 

One figure was missing. Eleanor sat up, ignoring her back as it screamed in protest.

 

The dust swirling around them slowly gave way to the shadow of a figure. Vane was the only one on his feet. He was staring directly at Jennings.

 

Jennings tried not to stare in horror as the smoke settled and revealed what had become of the three English sailors under fire and debris. The sour smell of death and seared flesh choked the air, so that even if one could not look at what had remained of those three people, their presence and demise was impossible to ignore, “Alright, now that’s enough—“

 

Vane stood his ground, “No.”

 

“That’s an order, Vane.”

 

“Where are the rest of the men, Captain?”

 

Jennings did not respond. Ash and debris still fell around them.

 

“Two rounds of shoreleave and only five men in your cell. Where are the rest of the men, Captain?”

 

There was a long silence.

Vane’s voice was as sharp and cruel as a blade, “Did they kill them?”

 

“No,” Jennings said, his voice heavier and more tired than anyone had ever heard it. “Not yet.”

 

“What will happen to them?”

 

Jennings watched his Quartermaster with a face that was like ice as it begins to melt, solid and unmoving even as its edges begin to give way. The corner of his mouth twitched, a vein in his temple was throbbing, and just as Vane had seemed to become younger mere moments ago, it were now as though Jennings was aging right before everyone’s eyes.

 

“I want to hear you say it.” Vane growled with a hungry sort of ferocity, “If we leave them, what will happen to them?”

 

“They will hang, Vane.” Jennings’ voice was as controlled and steady as though he were merely relating food rations for the week, “They will be taken before a mob and they will hang. Crowds will gather. People will cheer. And they will hang.”

 

“And for what?”

 

“For following my orders.” Jennings felt his body scream in protest as he raised himself up to a sitting position, resting his throbbing back against the stone wall behind him that was still warm with the blast of hellfire.

 

As the dust finally settled and the putrid air opened into a foul smelling clarity, Jennings began to make out the shapes behind Vane. For the first time he saw the barrels of hay, and the barrels of gunpowder.

 

Jennings went pale, “You can’t intend to—“ His voice trailed off as a dawning notion of Vane’s intentions filled him with a cold horror.

 

It were as though Jennings were staring at someone he had never seen before. Once, his mother had told him that every time someone steps over the spot that will once be your grave, you feel it by way of a cold spectre that climbs up your spine and sinks into your soul. Jennings had always thought it was nonsense, until the day that Avery had found a dead eyed little boy chained in the shadows, a little ghost of a boy who rose from the bowels of a ship into Avery’s arms, and the captain commanded Jennings to bring him on board. At that moment Jennings felt sure that one day Avery would regret that decision dearly.

 

Staring at Vane then, a man just barely out of the clutches of childhood who stood over a smoldering pile of blood and gore that he had created from three living men, Jennings realised he had only been half right in his prediction. Staring at those strange, uncanny eyes that regarded death with all the indifference of an avenging demon, Jennings feared it was he and his men who would suffer for his Captain’s decision.

 

Vane’s voice came as calm and detached as though nothing had happened, but there was a tone there Jennings had only ever rarely heard, a low growl that seemed far too old for the youthful face of its owner, “Follow Hornigold, he’ll take you to the shore.”

 

Jennings shook his head as he tried to fight back the dawning realisation of what it was his Quartermaster intended to do, “This is not how we do this!” He roared, “This is not who we are!”

 

“This is our chance to send them a message!” Vane roared back, “You let those men live because you considered them your brothers, sailors under a King you have never ever met, and it was your men who payed the price! This is a chance to let England knows that there are prices to pay if they take one of our own!”

 

“Vane, we _are_ England! If we begin to turn on ourselves then--”

 

Vane’s face steadied, “So what were you doing in that cell? What are those men doing in that brig? Is that the England you wish to protect, one that would throw men into the dungeons with no trial, no justice, only a vague suspicion and the demands of a bloodthirsty mob?”

 

“Better to be killed as a fallen man of honour than to die a true traitor.”

 

Vane laughed, a cruel and bitter sound, “Do you believe that right now, that is what the men on that ship are thinking? Is that what they have to console them as they rot there under the garbage and the filth, with the shadows to keep them company and the rats to eat at their flesh?

 

Before Jennings could respond, it was Hornigold cut in.

 

“Settle now, boy. Though I have no liking for your Captain, he is still your Captain and you are beholden to some respect. Should you wish to punish him, take it up with the men. But now is not the—“

 

Now it was not voices they heard echoing from the halls, but the distinctive clatter of booted feet, many, many booted feet.

 

Vane looked down at Jennings who still sat on the ground, “Go. Follow Hornigold. The men still need a Captain, even if it is you.”

 

“Vane, I will not allow—“

 

Vane squared on him a look that promised far worse than what awaited the doomed and wretched sailors about to walk in on their own destruction, “Right now, captain, it is not in your position to allow anything.”

 

Jennings opened his mouth to rebuke but Hornigold grabbed him by the arm and yanked him to his feet, eliciting a cry that was not altogether on accident on the part of Jennings’ old rival.

 

Hornigold met Vane’s eyes, “I will not forget this,” whether he meant this for better or worse, no one but Hornigold and Vane seemed to be able to tell.

 

With Jennings’ arm draped over Hornigold’s shoulders, the men disappeared into yet another one of the labyrinthine tunnels that snaked through the fort. Mr. Scott stopped before the shadows when he realised he was running alone. He stopped, and to his shock he found that Eleanor, who for years had been like a shadow, was not by his side. 

 

He saw her there, her feet planted to the ground, staring at the young madman of the Diamond's crew.

 

"Eleanor!" Mr. Scott shouted.

 

She turned to him, and she smiled. Making no effort to move. "Go on ahead, I'll catch up."

 

Mr. Scott was not the only one taken aback by this. Even in the white hot flame of his rage and hate, Vane had still vaguely hoped that the display would have been enough to send Eleanor Guthrie packing.

 

Ofcourse, he had no such luck.

 

Mr. Scott began to move back towards her, intent as he was that he would throw the girl over his shoulders if he had to, "Eleanor, I will not leave you in this place, with this-- with this--" Mr. Scott knew well what it was he stared at in the young man called Charles Vane, though he found he could not say it. The boy with the strange eyes who stood in fire and smoke, who faced fire with all the indifference of a hellspawn.

 

And whom he had watched run to Eleanor and protect her from the blast.

 

That Scott knew not what to make of that act only made him all the more uncomfortable.

 

"Eleanor--"

 

"Mr. Scott, if we are both caught, who do you think will free us?" She said with all the calm of someone who was not awaiting an ambush of soldiers. It was clear she was daring him to suggest that her father would ever jeopardise his running for governor by trying to free either of them, daring him to lie to her. And that was the one thing she knew he would not do. "Let me stay here. Should I be caught, you will come for me, won't you?"

 

Mr. Scott stared at her, her unwavering smile. His gaze flitted between her and the one called Vane. His body was riveted to the spot, but it was his soul that stirred, his soul that traveled back to the home of Richard Guthrie on an Island that now seemed like it was on the other side of the world, to the people he kept there as slaves. To a kind smile that had made his heart ache, to a singsong laugh and a woman who was to him as the moon and the sun. And a young girl no older than Eleanor whose father had made a promise that he would never abandon her as Eleanor Guthrie had been abandoned.

 

No. Were he and Eleanor caught, there would be no one to come for them, no one to free them. And his moon and sun and their daughter would be left to wait for a husband and father who would never come back to them.

 

It was the first time Eleanor would ever hear such anger in Mr. Scott's voice, "You are no longer a child, Eleanor. Whatever happens, understand it is because of the choices you have made. I cannot protect you from the consequences of your actions."

 

Eleanor nodded, "I understand."

 

Scott looked to Vane, "If anything happens to her, understand, boy, that I will make you regret it."

 

If Vane had meant to argue for Eleanor to leave him, then the clear threat from Mr. Scott stopped him. He smiled then as a young lion in the territory of the reigning king, "You will try."

 

Scott's lips pressed together, and it was clear that doubt still held him in place. But with the nearing approach of booted footsteps, the decision was made for him. Scott looked to Eleanor for what he hoped was not one last time, and turned into the darkness, vowing that when she got out of this, he would have a very long conversation with her about this day. A conversation that maybe involved threats of a Nunnery.

 

With her arms folded and the infinite patience of someone merely waiting for a ship to make dock, Eleanor turned to Vane. “You planned this from the beginning, didn’t you?” She said, and gestured to the barrels of gunpowder.

 

He shrugged, “It was a gamble. These old Dutch forts have a weakness for keeping their powder next to their cells.”

 

Eleanor’s mouth was a thin line across her face, “You are unbelievable. You promised me!”

 

Vane smirked in a way Eleanor would have not thought him capable of just moments ago when he had rained down fury and hatred upon his own Captain, “I promised nothing. I merely said that I understood you, not that I agreed with you.

 

Cries began to ring out just ahead of them.

 

_“There they are!”_

_“Stop right there!”_

 

Vane turned to Eleanor, his eyes grave, “This is your last chance, Miss. Guthrie.”

 

Eleanor didn’t move, “Don’t tell me you’re going to try and get rid of me now.”

 

Vane smirked again, vaguely wondering if the girl was possibly more insane than he was.

 

When the Night’s Watch arrived at the cells, they had just enough time to see two figures disappearing into the walls, and a barrel roll lazily into the fort’s supply of gunpowder.

 

***

 

The blast could be felt in varying degrees throughout New Providence. In Nassau, everyone merely assumed that they had finally had too much to drink, and that maybe with a few drinks more they could make the earth shake again, just for the hell of it. In New Adelaide, a minor tremor was just enough to rattle a few glasses and knock over enough pots that an emergency meeting was held at the church so that all could gather in order to prepare for the second coming of mankind’s lord and saviour.

 

When her ears had stopped ringing, Eleanor once again found herself on her stomach. Though this time, far from the cold and unforgiving ground that had robbed her of her breath earlier, she found, much to her surprise, that the floor of the cave was oddly warm, and almost seemed to be rising and falling. It was almost soothing. It were almost as though the floor were breathing—

 

Eleanor jumped back as though burned. The floor, or rather, the thing she had fallen upon, winced, but did not stir.

 

Groping around blindly in the dark, Eleanor felt for where Vane had fallen. He was still lying where she had jumped off him. Her eyes adjusting to the dark, she saw his own were still closed.

 

Her breathing began to quicken as the sight came into sharp focus in the hazy purple light of dawn. It was, indeed, the cabin boy, the quartermaster. Vane lay unmoving before her, his back to the ground, his shirt and breeches singed with fire and gunpowder. In the rising light she could make out his features. Dark stains were running from the corner of his mouth and ears, the rising and falling of his chest was quickly growing shallow.

 

“Vane,” She whispered, edging closer to him. He did not stir. “Vane!”

 

Nothing.

 

A cold and terrible fever seemed to wash over Eleanor. For one moment she felt as though she stood in two worlds, the world of now, where she was watching Charles Vane die before her, and a world long gone by, the last time she had been in close proximity to a body that hovered between life and death. Her hands withdrew from him as if burned, the memory of her mother’s cold and lifeless skin still too fresh in her mind.

 

Eleanor willed her hands to stop shaking but it did not work. She sat there, frozen by a ghost reaching for her from across the past, paralyzed by the fear that should she touch him again she would once more find only the empty husk of a person whom she—

 

She reached for him, past her fears, past her past and her ghosts, she reached for him, splaying her hands across his chest, “Vane!” She repeated, feeling the shallow breath under her palm.

 

She trembled with the will it was taking her to keep holding on, to not pull away as she so terribly wished to do, to leave him to his fate and to run and hide to the safety of Max and Mr. Scott. She had always been certain that on the day her mother had died, a part of her had also ceased to be. But right then Eleanor refused to be that girl anymore, prisoner to anyone or anything, her past or her fears.

 

Should he die, she would be there with him.

 

“I thought…” Came a small but decidedly arrogant and insufferable voice, “I thought you said you were going to call me Charles.” Those bright eyes opened then, and, to Eleanor’s disbelief, Vane smirked.

 

And with her heart in her hand, fearing for his life, Eleanor found she was flooded with relief to find that Charles Vane would live another day, so that she might kill him for all the trouble he had caused her with her own bare hands.

 

***

 

Hornigold had sent for the Diamond to send their best and brightest to sneak past the English line and come to the aid of the Diamonds’ Captain.

 

It would be said for years to come that the man who came out of that secret tunnel was not Henry Jennings, but merely a shadow of the man who had died when he had learned that his men were in the bowels of a British ship, destined to die for an ill fated venture that had brought him and his once captain nothing but their own destruction.

 

Upon the explosion from the south wing of the Fort, Hornigold had uttered such a cry of dismay that some thought he might throw himself to the ocean. Watching the smoke that rose from the fort, he had revealed that he had just finished a round of renovations on the fort, and the men of the Diamond found out from Mr. Scott that such calamities had become somewhat commonplace in the old structure, as natural to the citizens of Nassau as the migrating of birds.

 

Though he was looking directly at the fort, Jennings seemed to be paying no attention to Hornigold’s misfortunes. “Had you ever seen such a thing?”

 

Before anyone could respond, he went on, “A boy joking around as a child, and then just like that he was gone, swallowed up by a demon with his face and his eyes.”

 

Nobody had needed to ask whom he had been referring to. It had been accepted that the boy, and the equally strange girl, must have died in the blast, their lives a noble sacrifice for Nassau. Mr. Scott, however, seemed hesitant to join in the eulogy giving just yet.

 

When the Diamond’s best and brightest had arrived to the rescue, it was the tall scraggly Jack Rackham who had managed to evade the English authorities, all with a smile on his face and a pink and green waistcoat that could be seen an ocean away.

 

When he took in the somber expressions, his was a fitting reply of, “Who died?”

 

Nobody had the heart to tell him that Charles Vane, his only friend and the only living human that had the patience for him, was gone.

 

Nobody, that is, except for Mr. Scott, who responded with, “They seem to believe that your Charles Vane and my Eleanor Guthrie are dead.”

 

The men, bloodthirsty men with the reputation of killers, stared at Mr. Scott in horror, alarmed that he could deliver such devastating news in such lighthearted terms.

 

But Jack only grinned all the wider, and the men thought for sure that he must have gone insane with shock, “They do, do they?” He replied, “We’ll see about that.”

 

And indeed, they did. As nobody had the heart to tell the clearly grief maddened Rackham that his friend was dead, they sat there on the small rowboat, staring up at the cliff from which they’d exited and wondering if this was the last time they would ever see New Providence Island.

 

When a laughter broke through the silence, everyone was braced to find Rackham had finally snapped.

 

But it was his boyish and mocking laugh, but a low and joyful one, full of pride.

 

It was Mr. Scott.

 

The men knew well the story of how Richard Guthrie had abandoned his only daughter to the care of his servant, and felt it only natural that the man would snap.

 

It was Jennings who noticed his fixed gaze.

 

Jennings traced his path and there, upon the face of the cliff, Eleanor Guthrie and Charles Vane emerged from the shadows.


End file.
